Max Rosenn: an ideal appellate judge.

• Author: Aldisert, Ruggero J.
• Position: Testimonial

They call it the effete East because it conjures up the image of huge modern cities with shining glass skyscrapers, subways, and mass movement of people. Only an hour's drive from New York City, however, brings you to Northeastern Pennsylvania, a region whose history bespeaks more of Western frontier hardscrabble than New York metropolitanism.

It all started with coal, not the bituminous coal that feeds the steel mills of Pittsburgh, Birmingham, and Gary, Indiana, but the hard coal--anthracite coal--first used to drive the steamships and fire huge boilers that provided the heating of houses and buildings from Boston to Philadelphia.

Before the coal was discovered, there was a place known only as the Wyoming Valley, first inhabited by the Shawanese and Delaware Indian tribes in the early 1700s. In 1769, a group of Yankee settlers from Connecticut became the first Europeans to reach the area, and they named it after John Wilkes and Isaac Barre, two members of the British Parliament who supported colonial America. They called it Wilkes-Barre.

The Valley's population exploded when anthracite coal was discovered in the 1800s, and coal also made possible the growth of the neighboring cities of Scranton and Hazelton. Wilkes-Barre was the commercial center of the coal industry and now has a population of over 40,000. It is the county seat of Luzerne County.

The mines are now closed, following the environmental concerns that swept post-World II America. The railroads were forced to switch to diesel or electric power, and oil and natural gas began to heat houses instead of smoky coal. Coal mining was a dangerous occupation and the public's concern for miners' safety became dominant.

Today, Wilkes-Barre is a governmental, educational, and medical center, recognized as the birthplace of modern cable programming dating back over thirty years. It is a quiet town with both Kings College and Wilkes University established on the banks of the Susquehanna on River Street in Center City.

The calm and beauty of the modern Wyoming Valley gives no clue to its turbulent and often violent history. On June 21, 1877, known as "Black Thursday," the first of twenty Irish coal miners, charged with the murder of twenty-four mine foremen and a superintendent in the coal field, were hanged without trial. They were known as the "Molly Maguires," a secret band of miners who took revenge against the Reading Railroad and its mine bosses for the horrible conditions in the mine. They infiltrated, captured, tried, and hanged the Pinkerton agents and railroad and coal mine officials. Some saw the Irish as brutal terrorists and others, as martyred heroes of the labor movement. A hundred years later, the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons recommended a posthumous pardon for the "Molly Maguires."

On February 4, 1910, thirty years after the historic warfare in the mines, Max Rosenn was born in the Wyoming Valley farming hamlet of Plains, Pennsylvania. And, except for the brief periods when he stayed part-time in Harrisburg as Secretary of Public Welfare for Pennsylvania, and World War II Army service in the Philippines from 1944 to 1946, he would never leave the Valley. He would make his home in Kingston, a mile and a half from where he was born and less than two miles from the United States Courthouse that now bears his name. It was here where he lived his full life with his wife, Tillie Hershkowitz, and their two boys (who would become Professor Keith Rosenn of the University of Miami and Dr. Daniel Rosenn of Boston).

Symbolically, he would die at age ninety-six, on February 7, 2006, the same day as our court's other nonagenarian, Albert Branson Maris, who died at age ninety-five, on February 7, 1989. Our main courtroom in Philadelphia is named after Judge Maris.

Although ninety-six years is a long life by any measure, that number alone does not fully capture the richness of Max Rosenn's life. He founded...