Few Supreme Court justices have been more widely praised for the
quality of their writing than Progressive hero Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., who sat on the Court from 1902 to 1932. Yet as
author and arts critic Terry Teachout recently pointed out, while
Holmes may be "the only American jurist whose opinions are by way
of being great literature," the "beauty of his style sometimes
lent undeserved force to deeply problematic views." For evidence,
look no further than Holmes’ infamous majority opinion in
Buck v. Bell, which upheld the forced sterilization of a
young woman and ended with the judgment “Three generations of
imbeciles are enough.” As
Teachout writes:

I always remember the fate of Carrie Buck whenever I hear a
judge praised for the literary artfulness of his opinions. I
yield to no one in my admiration for what Walter Lippmann
called "the grand style" of Justice Holmes' writings. His was a
great personality, one fully worthy of having been enshrined in
the pages of Patriotic Gore, an