Chief Judge Cuthbert Pound.

• Author: Smith, Robert S.
• Position: Symposium: Judges on Judges: The New York State Court of Appeals Judges' Own Favorites in Court History - Testimonial

Hello, thank you for having us here.

Thank you, Professor Bonventre, for organizing this wonderful event.

I'm going to talk to you about a Judge named Cuthbert Pound, going back even further in time than Judge Read did, because Judge Pound was leaving the Court, more or less, as Judge Loughran was arriving. And they, I guess, served together very briefly.

It was a whim of mine that made me something of the in-house expert on Judge Pound. When Judge Rosenblatt asked me to write a chapter for the book that you've all heard so much about, I picked Judge Pound because I'd sort of heard of him and was trying to figure out who he was. I knew that he was a colleague of Judge Cardozo's and didn't know much more. I realize now that there are serious gaps in my knowledge even now.

When I heard Judge Pigott a few minutes ago, I asked him who he was talking about and he said Matt Jasen, and I said, my God, what did Cuthbert Pound's friends call him? It seems unimaginable that they called him Cuthbert. But I have absolutely--I have no idea what the answer to that question is, and that's just a gap in my research that I didn't realize until today.

I do have a general idea of who he was. He was an upstate Republican politician, he came from Lockport in Niagara County, he had been a town attorney and a State Senator, and he was a Judge of real distinction. After serving as a professor at Cornell Law School, he went on the Supreme Court and, after a number of years, came to the Court of Appeals in 1914.

He had enough national reputation that he was mentioned in the early 1920s as a possible candidate for the United States Supreme Court. We know that because of a scathing letter from Chief Justice Taft to President Harding saying, "Please, don't appoint Pound, the man's a dissenter. You can't have that on the United States Supreme Court." He said, "We have enough trouble as it is with Holmes and Brandeis, I mean, this is getting out of hand. He's as bad as that fellow Learned Hand on the Second Circuit, we can't have any of these." I rather suspect that maybe it was perhaps not that Judge Pound tended to be a dissenter, but perhaps also that his dissents were not always in agreement with the views of Chief Justice Taft that may have had something to do with that opinion.

Judge Pound never did make it to the United States Supreme Court, but he did acquire some reputation, and, as you might be able to guess if you know the politics at the time, from Taft's...