Nation: A Matter of Spirit

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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."