Book Review Learned Hand: the Man and the Judge
| Pages | 375 |
| Publication year | 2021 |
68 CBJ 375. BOOK REVIEW LEARNED HAND: The Man and the Judge
Recently a local newspaper published a quote from Learned Hand's 1944 Spirit of Liberty speech in its "Clergy Comer." The minister-editor likened Hand's "124 pithy words" to the Gettysburg Address and the Beatitudes. Hand, a confirmed agnostic, may well have been amused to see himself in print on the religion page. This is, however, part of the legend of Learned Hand, whose opinions are still worried over by first-year law students and whose views of society have now become part of the American credo. Now a sparkling new book breaks through the aura of legend and pictures the true Hand, "warts and all."
Professor Gerald Gunther, a former clerk to the judge, has spent twenty years preparing this excellent biography, which presents a fair recounting of Hand's full and active life. Connecticut attorneys will be entertained, but there is much here which educates as well.
While Hand might be worshipped today as an ever-enduring philosopher-king of the law, his path to success was not easy, and the path often was not of his own choosing. Born in Albany, New York, to a family (fn1) who traditionally demanded that its offspring be attorneys, Hand was reluctantly pushed into a legal career after his graduation from Harvard. Beginning first in Albany in 1896, and then later in New York City, Hand carried on a small unrewarding practice, as various firms with which he was associated collapsed for lack of business or due to feuds among the partners. He did make connections in academic and reformist political circles and was able to gather support to be named a federal district judge in 1909. Hand was appointed by the conservative President Taft, because Taft at the time was under pressure, immediately after his election, to name "good government" people, not necessarily of his political stripe.
As a district judge, Hand still did not find happiness. Many of his cases were mundane receiverships with various hangers-on beseeching the court for favors; others were criminal cases brought under the Volstead Act which enforced Prohibition. He did develop, however, in these years his lifelong mastery of statutory interpretation. As has been pointed out in Hand's favor, his real achievement was the skill with which he handled the 4,000 mostly routine cases he heard...
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