At the end of the anxious carriage ride with Fanny Holmes and George Shattuck across East Cambridge on December 8, 1882, lay Holmes's appointment to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts – the “SJC,” as lawyers call it. It would present him with a large workload and broad, basically unlimited appellate jurisdiction, ruling on all appeals, criminal and civil. Much of the work was as mundane as any state court of its era, ranging through crimes, injuries to body, property, and land, business and domestic relations, and local regulation.

Holmes soon wrote Pollock, “No very great or burning questions have been before me although a good many fairly interesting ones.” Their correspondence reveals that “interesting” to Holmes meant capable of testing or confirming “some theories of [his] book.”