Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
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During his tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court, to which he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, he supported the constitutionality of state economic regulation and came to advocate broad freedom of speech under the First Amendment, after, in ''Schenck v. United States'' (1919), having upheld for a unanimous court criminal sanctions against draft protestors with the memorable maxim that "free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic" and formulating the groundbreaking "clear and present danger" test. Later that same year, in his famous dissent in ''Abrams v. United States'' (1919), he wrote that "the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market... That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment." He added that "we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death...."
''The Journal of Legal Studies'' has identified Holmes as the third-most-cited American legal scholar of the 20th century. Holmes was a legal realist, as summed up in his maxim, "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience," a moral skeptic, and an opponent of the doctrine of natural law. His jurisprudence and academic writing influenced much subsequent American legal thinking, including the judicial consensus upholding New Deal regulatory law and the influential American schools of pragmatism, critical legal studies, and law and economics. Provided by Wikipedia