Thomas Healy

Go on strike.

They were Russian immigrants who were anarchists.

Three men, one woman.

They went on rooftops in lower Manhattan and threw these leaflets from the rooftops.

In the fall of 1919, eight months after the earlier cases had been handed down by the court.

Something happened to these young friends, in particular to Lasky and Frankfurter.

And to the conservative alumni at Harvard, this was just anathema.

And so there was this effort at Harvard... To get Lasky fired from his job.

There was a fundraising effort going on at Harvard...

And a lot of the alums were saying they wouldn't give money as long as Lasky and Frankfurter were there.

So seven members of the court voted to uphold the convictions, but Holmes dissented.

Here's what he wrote.

It's short.

It's 12 paragraphs.

So the first thing he's saying is that we should be skeptical that we know the truth.

And we're likely going to be wrong again.

In light of that knowledge that we may be wrong, the best course of action, the safest course of action, is to go ahead and listen to the ideas on the other side.

Those are the ideas that we can safely act upon.

He says every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based on imperfect knowledge.

Yeah, absolutely.