Research Wednesday | November 12, 2025
The Enduring Value of Changing One’s Mind
In Research Wednesdays, I have always quoted others rather than myself. I hope that readers will allow me an exception in this case.
Oliver Wendell Holmes remains one of the greatest jurists in the history of the Supreme Court. It was not always so. Holmes sat on the Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. In the early decades of the 20th Century, Holmes repeatedly sustained the convictions of people – usually socialists or supporters of workers' rights – who had distributed pamphlets against the United States' involvement in foreign wars or discouraged young men from participating in military service. Some of these sentences carried a twenty-year prison term. In that era, First Amendment jurisprudence was in its infancy and, as Holmes and his colleagues saw it, the vital interests of the nation took clear priority over freedom of speech. How did this opponent of free expression go down in history as the greatest advocate of First Amendment rights?
In 1918 and the years that followed, speech against the government was anything but free. Even when sidewalk orations, magazine articles, or amateur pamphlets decrying America’s involvement in the Great War had nothing to do with active interference with the military or its mission, people expressing what today would be regarded as protected speech were quickly arrested, charged, found guilty (sometimes in a matter of minutes), and incarcerated for years. As political discourse becomes coarser and threatening, and as acts of violence against the left and right proliferate, it is not difficult to hear echoes of a century ago, when suppression of speech seems more appealing than resolving disputes with violence.
Fortunately, we have a model for resolving even the most contentious issues without violence, and that is the willingness of even those engaged in the most vigorous arguments to stop, reconsider, and change their minds. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is that model. He infuriated progressives with his defense of government crackdowns on political dissent, even to the point of supporting a postmaster who refused to distribute dissenting political literature through the mail. He upheld the convictions of socialists, including Eugene Debs and many lesser-known figures, for simply articulating their opposition to President Wilson’s foreign policies. In tersely written three-paragraph opinions, he regularly dismissed appeals to the First Amendment, which, on its face, guarantees freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. He argued in these cases that there was no right to free speech. In a matter of months, however, he changed course. To the consternation of his colleagues on the bench and government advocates around the nation, this most famous judge in the land abruptly decided that his previous convictions had been wrong. He devoted the remainder of his career to defending free speech and, often in dissent, railed against the Court’s prevailing view that the First Amendment was limited when people spoke against the government.
Holmes provides three key lessons for us today. First, the past is not prologue. We are not chained to past beliefs, however stridently we have expressed them. Second, words matter. As surely as words can lead to violence and bigotry, words can also move even the most intransigent true believers to new points of view. Judges, lawyers, and law school students still read Holmes a century after his change of heart, not because they value his early decisions that reflected censorship and suppression, but because, in his later years, he established principles of free speech and civil discourse that prevail today. In a time of rhetoric that vilifies opponents and, tragically, sometimes leads to violence, let us remember the example of Justice Holmes. Enduring impact requires not singular acts of violence, but rather the willingness to change one’s mind.
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