Legislators existed to change the law.

After a lunch with Judge Learned Hand, as Holmes was departing in a carriage to return to work, Judge Hand said to him: "Do justice, sir. Do justice."

Holmes had the carriage stopped. "That is not my job," he said. "My job is to apply the law."

Holmes wrote that he did not "think it desirable that the judges should undertake to renovate the law." If the law needed changing, that was what the democratic process was for. Indeed, that was what the separation of powers in legislative, executive and judicial branches by the Constitution of the United States was for.

"The criterion of constitutionality," he said, "is not whether we believe the law to be for the public good." That was for other people to decide. For judges, he said: "When we know what the source of the law has said it shall be, our authority is at an end."

One of Holmes' judicial opinions ended: "I am not at liberty to consider the justice of the Act."

Some have tried to depict Justice Holmes as someone who saw no need for morality in the law. On the contrary, he said: "The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life." But a society's need to put moral content into its laws did not mean that it was the judge's job to second-guess the moral choices made by others who were authorized to make such choices.

Justice Holmes understood the difference between the rule of law and the rule of lawyers and judges.