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?"