Learned Hand

Learned Hand

Billings Learned Hand was an American judge and judicial philosopher. He served on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and later the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Hand is remembered as a pioneer of modern approaches to statutory interpretation.

About Learned Hand in brief

Summary Learned HandBillings Learned Hand was an American judge and judicial philosopher. He served on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and later the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Hand is remembered as a pioneer of modern approaches to statutory interpretation. His decisions in specialist fields, such as patents, torts, admiralty law, and antitrust law, set lasting standards for craftsmanship and clarity. On constitutional matters, he was both a political progressive and an advocate of judicial restraint. He believed in the protection of free speech and in bold legislation to address social and economic problems. In 1944 during World War II, he gave a short address in Central Park that struck a popular chord in its appeal for tolerance. His collection of papers and addresses, published in 1952 as The Spirit of Liberty, sold well and won him new admirers. The depth of Hand’s early religious convictions was in sharp contrast to his later agnosticism. He was beset by anxieties and self-doubt throughout his life, including night terrors as a child. He later admitted he was undecided, very insecure, and a very insecure person—a person who had always been very insecure. He died of cancer at the age of 83. He is buried in Albany, New York. He had been a prominent family with a tradition of activism in the Democratic Party. His father was an appellate lawyer, who had risen rapidly through the ranks of an Albany-based law firm in the 1860s and, by age 32, was the firm’s leading lawyer.

His mother was an involved and protective mother, who passed on a sense of duty and duty to her only son to help him cope, including writing to his cousin Augustus Noble Noble Noble, who was dying of cancer. The family had an \”almost hereditary\” attachment to the legal profession and has been described as \”the most distinguished legal family in northern New York\”. He was named for a maternal uncle and a grandfather, both named Billings Peck Learned. His son later described his relations with his father as “not really intimate’”. Samuel Hand died from cancer when Learned was 14. Learned’s mother thereafter promoted an idealized memory of her husband’s professional success, intellectual abilities, and parental perfection, placing considerable pressure on her son. He later described himself as a “very insecure person’ — a person who was always very insecure and a very anxious person who later admitted that he was “a very insecureperson’s very insecure’.” He died at age 83. In 2004, as of 2004 Hand had been quoted more often by legal scholars and by the Supreme Court of the United states than any other lower-court judge. Scholars have recognized the Second circuit under Hand as one of the finest appeals courts in the country’s history. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge promoted Hand to the Court of appeals for the second Circuit, which he went on to lead as the Senior Circuit Judge from 1939 until his semi-retirement in 1951.