A Matter of Spirit

He was called the greatest jurist of his day, a legal eminence worthy of rank with John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was, in fact, a great human. And the real contribution of Judge Learned Hand, who died last week in Manhattan at 89, was less to the body of the law than to its spirit.

Learned Hand served as a federal judge longer than any other man--52 years. His opinions were prodigious, totaled more than 2,000. covering every phase of the law from maritime liens to complicated antitrust cases. His tart observations ("Judges can be damned fools like anybody else") were treasured. On the bench. Judge Hand was a formidable figure, a stocky man with the broad shoulders of his Kentish forebears, glittering eyes under dense brows, and craggy features that might have been carved by Gutzon Berglum. Intolerant of lawyers who strayed from the point or became too verbose. Judge Hand sent wayward attorneys scampering back to the facts with an acid query--"May I inquire, sir, what are you trying to tell us?"--or just a furious "Rubbish!"' Once, confronting the ferocious old judge at a Yale Law School moot court, a terrified student fainted dead away.

"A Mere Vaudevillian." In writing his decisions. Hand followed the meticulous painstaking procedure that he demanded in his court. He invariably wrote three or four drafts of every opinion in longhand on yellow foolscap before the language and reasoning finally satisfied him. His opinions cut to the marrow of the issue and proceeded eloquently but rapidly to the point. Hand's famed 28-page opinion on United States v. Aluminum Co. of America, in which he ruled that "good" monopolies had no more legality than "bad" monopolies, was distilled from 40,000 pages and four years of testimony, has been a model for every subsequent antitrust suit.

Off the bench. Judge Hand dropped his austerity as casually as he doffed his judicial robes. He was a noted mimic and singer who delighted Justice Holmes with ribald sea chanteys ("I fear he thinks I am a mere vaudevillian") and vigorously played cowboys and Indians with his children and grandchildren after court had adjourned.

An indefatigable hiker, he walked four miles to his courtroom every morning until he was past 75: "I shall continue the practice until that final morning when, fittingly. I shall fall backward head over heels down the courthouse steps." He detested barking dogs and chewing gum,, once assaulted a quailing law clerk with: "Sonny! We have come to a parting of the ways. I smell Spearmint again." But in some rare areas his ignorance was monumental. "I don't know what Mickey Mantle is or does," he once complained. "Is it a man?"

Learned Hand was marked for the bench: his father and grandfather were both distinguished judges; a cousin. Judge Augustus N. Hand, served with him for years on the Court of Appeals in New York (their fellow judges sometimes referred to them as "the left Hand and the right Hand"). At Harvard, Learned Hand majored in philosophy, studied under Santayana. Josiah Royce and William James, and graduated summa cum laude before moving on to law school. As a young lawyer in an Albany firm, he prospered, but he longed to sit on the other side of the bar. President William Howard Taft spotted him in 1909, named him as a federal district judge when he was only 37. In 1924. Calvin Coolidge elevated Hand to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals--and "C.A." swiftly became one of the most esteemed courts in the land.

"The Womb of Time." Judge Learned Hand often seemed almost to scoff at the law he served. "The aim of the law.'' he once said, "is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man." He was a legal secularist, denying the existence of a natural law and cautioning younger judges not to "embrace the exhilarating opportunity of anticipating a doctrine which may be in the womb of time, but whose birth is distant." He was also a charitable judge who could write, in reversing a lower court's refusal to grant citizenship to a woman because of contentions of bad moral character, that "a continued illicit relationship is not inevitably an index of bad moral character."

Above all. Learned Hand was a passionate admirer and defender of liberty. In 1950, his opinion upholding the Smith Act conviction of eleven top U.S. Communists was hailed as a legal milestone. Perhaps his true epitaph can be found in his own words, delivered to 150,000 newly naturalized Americans in Central Park in 1944: "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near 2,000 years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten: that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest."

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