Nathaniel Holmes was an American lawyer. He served as a judge at the state supreme court, and later became professor of Law at Harvard.
Background
Nathaniel Holmes was born on January 2, 1815 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, United States. He was the son of Samuel and Mary (Annan) Holmes. He was descended from Nathaniel Holmes, born in Coleraine, Ireland, who emigrated to Londonderry, New Hampshire, in 1740. His father was a pioneer manufacturer of machinery, who soon after his son's birth moved to Springfield, Vermont, where he built a cotton mill and a machine shop.
Education
Holmes attended the academies in Chester, Vermont, and New Ipswich, New Hampshire. Later he went to Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated from Harvard College in 1837.
He studied law in Maryland while doing private tutoring, and at the Harvard Law School, 1838-1839.
Career
Holmes was admitted to the Boston bar and moved to St. Louis, where he practised law until 1865. In 1846 he was city and county attorney, and in 1853-1854 counselor of the school board. In 1856 he became a charter member of the Academy of Science of St. Louis and was long its energetic corresponding secretary.
At the close of the Civil War, Missouri held a constitutional convention, which not only established a notorious test oath for all office-holders, subsequently held void by the United States Supreme Court, but also with even more questionable authority passed an ordinance ousting the duly elected judges of the state supreme court and directing the governor to appoint their successors. Governor T. C. Fletcher appointed Holmes and two others. Two of the existing judges refused to quit and obtained an injunction from the St. Louis circuit court prohibiting Holmes's two associates from disturbing the sessions of the old supreme court. The governor called in police who installed Holmes and his two associates by forcibly removing their reluctant predecessors. Shortly afterward, Holmes delivered a judicial opinion declaring the injunction invalid. These high-handed proceedings must have been the only exciting event in Holmes's life.
He served on the court from 1865 until 1868 and with his two associates turned out a large volume of work. His many opinions are competent but not distinguished, and none of his decisions except that just mentioned has proved important in the development of the law.
In 1868 Holmes resigned his judgeship to become Royal Professor of Law at Harvard. The invitation came from Professor Theophilus Parsons, who was undoubtedly drawn to Holmes by their common zealous adherence to Swedenborgianism. Harvard Law School then possessed two eminent legal writers as professors, Parsons and Emory Washburn, but the students remained unstimulated by classroom discussion and untested by examinations, and the library had become very unsatisfactory. Holmes appears to have accepted this situation without question, and took no active part in the administration of the school. His lectures on equity, bailments, and domestic relations were not sufficiently noteworthy to receive comment in the recollections of students of his time.
In 1870 the new president of Harvard, Charles W. Eliot, secured the appointment of C. C. Langdell as dean, who completely reorganized the school by the introduction of written examinations and the case-method of instruction. Because of his inability to accept the new methods, Holmes resigned on May 6, 1872, at the request of the President and Fellows. He returned to practice in St. Louis but retired in 1883 and settled once more in Cambridge, where he died. Holmes did no legal writing, but was widely interested in other subjects. His Realistic Idealism in Philosophy Itself (1888) exhibits extensive philosophic and scientific reading but has had no perceptible influence and now seems unreadable.
In his old age he compiled "A Genealogy of the Holmes Family of Londonderry, New Hampshire, " containing garrulous sketches of his relatives and a long autobiography.
Views
Holmes was the first writer after Delia Bacon to support the Baconian hypothesis. He uses no arguments about ciphers but furnishes an exhaustive collection of parallel passages in the plays and Bacon's writings.
Personality
Holmes' scholarship and fairness have been praised by his opponents.