Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Quotes
Our test of truth is a reference to either a present or imagined future majority in favour of our view.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Collected Legal Papers. Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920, p. 310.
See Otis Singletary for a similar modern view
See Walter Reynolds {32317} for a later English version. Also, Alcuin of York {593018} and William Tecumseh Sherman for an opposite view using a similar phrase. Hesiod's seems to be the earliest version of this idea that is with us today.
An excellent example of this occurred in the first decades of the 21st century. At the beginning if the century, the majority of Americans were clearly opposed to the idea of same-sex / gay marriage. By 2008, the population was evenly split, for and against. By 2014 the majority of Americans were clearly in favor of same-sex marriage and it had been legalized in more than a dozen states.
Meiji the Great. “Public Opinion” had the same meaning for the Japanese of this time as modern Western democracies perceive it with one exception. The public did not include all; it included only landlords— who owned land and had peasants on it. However, even asking them was an incredible step forward. The Emperor even sent formal written surveys to the landlords and in that sense, Japanese methodology of ascertaining public opinion was far ahead of the West. These reforms were opposed by the nobility and later the military, and by the 1930s there was no semblance of democracy left in Japan.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932. Noted for his long service, concise and pithy opinions, and deference to the decisions of elected legislatures, he is one of the most widely cited United States Supreme Court justices in history, particularly for opinions on civil liberties and American constitutional democracy, and is one of the most influential American common law judges, honored during his lifetime in Great Britain as well as the United States. Holmes retired from the court at the age of 90, an unbeaten record for oldest justice in the federal Supreme Court (although John Paul Stevens was only 8 months younger when he retired on April 12, 2010). He previously served as an Associate Justice and as Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and was Weld Professor of Law at his alma mater, Harvard Law School.
