Learned Hand

Billings Learned Hand was born January 27, 1872, in Albany, New York, into a family of prominent lawyers; his father Samuel argued appellate cases before New York's highest court and died when Learned was fourteen. He disliked the name Billings enough to drop it for life, going by "B." among friends. At Harvard he studied philosophy under William James and Josiah Royce before Harvard Law School, where professor James Bradley Thayer's case for deferring to elected legislatures gave him an idea that would organize the rest of his career. He returned to Albany to practice law and found he was bad at it. "I was never any good as a lawyer," he said later, and courtroom appearances left him rattled and unsure of himself.

President Taft put Hand on the federal bench in Manhattan in 1909, at thirty-seven, one of the youngest district judges in the country, and Calvin Coolidge elevated him to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1924, where he served until 1961 and led the court for more than a decade. Across roughly four thousand opinions he became the most influential judge never to sit on the Supreme Court: his 1917 free-speech test in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, initially overruled, shaped Justice Holmes's later dissents and, eventually, the modern doctrine in Brandenburg v. Ohio; his 1947 negligence formula in United States v. Carroll Towing is still taught in law schools; and his approach to statutory interpretation became standard method. By the time he died, courts quoted him more than any other lower-court judge in American history.

Hand wanted the Supreme Court badly enough to regret it later. Hoover passed him over in 1930 for Charles Evans Hughes, and Roosevelt passed him over again in 1942, citing his age, though Hand suspected politics and a rival's aggressive lobbying were the real reasons. "It was the importance, the power, the trappings of the God damn thing that really drew me on," he confessed near the end of his life, embarrassed by his own ambition. The private cost ran alongside it: his wife Frances spent long summers in Cornish, New Hampshire, with a Dartmouth professor named Louis Dow, an arrangement Hand accepted for decades rather than risk the marriage outright. His clerks remembered explosive tempers in chambers, turning his chair on lawyers whose arguments annoyed him, even as he privately doubted whether anyone truly respected him.

Hand delivered his most famous words almost by accident: a short address to nearly 1.5 million people at an "I Am an American Day" rally in Central Park on May 21, 1944, defining liberty as "the spirit which is not too sure that it is right." Reprinted in The New Yorker and Life, it turned an obscure appellate judge into something like a national conscience, a role he considered undeserved. He died August 18, 1961, and The Times of London wrote that his death closed "the golden age of the American judiciary." He never reached the Court he wanted, but by the early 2000s his opinions were cited more often than any other judge who never sat on it.

Learned Hand's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten case
  His free-speech "incitement" test, later echoed in Brandenburg v. Ohio 1917
• United States v. Carroll Towing Co. case
  His negligence formula, still taught in law schools 1947
• The Spirit of Liberty speech
  Delivered to 1.5 million people in Central Park, May 21, 1944 1944
• The Bill of Rights book
  Published lectures on judicial restraint and constitutional interpretation 1958

• January 27, 1872 aged 0 Born in Albany, New York
• 1896 aged ~24 Graduates Harvard Law School
• December 6, 1902 aged 30 Marries Frances Fincke
• April 1909 aged 37 Appointed U.S. District Judge by President Taft One of the youngest federal judges in the country, at 37.
• 1917 aged ~45 Decides Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten
• 1924 aged ~52 Elevated to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals by Calvin Coolidge
• May 21, 1944 aged 72 Delivers "The Spirit of Liberty" in Central Park
• 1951 aged ~79 Becomes senior circuit judge of the Second Circuit
• August 18, 1961 aged 89 Dies in New York City

• William Howard Taft 1857–1930
  Only person to serve as both president and Chief Justice of the United States. appointed
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 1841–1935
  Justice whose pragmatic jurisprudence and free-speech opinions deeply influenced American law. influenced by
• Felix Frankfurter 1882–1965
  Supreme Court justice and Harvard professor whose jurisprudence and government service shaped twentieth-century American law. championed by
• Walter Lippmann 1889–1974
  Columnist and political thinker whose work shaped modern journalism and debate over public opinion and democracy. co-founded The New Republic with
• J. D. Salinger 1919–2010
  Author whose fiction, especially The Catcher in the Rye, became a lasting touchstone of adolescent alienation. friend of