SOURCE: "The Attacks on Justice Holmes," in Justice Holmes, Natural Law, and the Supreme Court, The Macmillan Company, 1961, pp. 27-49.

In the following essay, Biddle discusses the reaction of many priests at Jesuit law schools against Holmes after Holmes's letters were published posthumously.

The attacks on Justice Holmes were stirred into life by the publication of his letters a few years after his death—there was hardly enough in the opinions and speeches to shock the well-bred ear of the average man; and the priests, who wrote most of the criticism, must have spent many hours combing the letters to sustain their view that here was a modern antichrist worthy of their mettle. The Justice's admirers came to his defense, but only here and there, and with dignity and caution, as if the charges were not worth answering, and it was simply a matter of misunderstanding their hero...