Considered several times as a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, he was passed over.
He
was not consistently conservative enough for Republican President
Warren G. Harding and not consistently liberal enough for Democrat
President Franklin Roosevelt.
His legal decisions, though, were so respected they were referenced in U.S. Supreme Court Cases.
His
name was Learned Hand, who served as a judge for over 50 years, first
on New York's District Court, then on the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Though a political progressive, he was an advocate of judicial restraint.
Judge Learned Hand, nicknamed 'the tenth justice of the Supreme Court', died AUGUST 18, 1961.
In
Gregory v. Helvering (2d Cir. 1934), Judge Hand wrote:
"Anyone
may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible;
he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury.
There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes...
Nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands."
Two
weeks before the D-Day invasion in the last year of World War II, Judge
Learned Hand was catapulted to national prominence when he gave a
speech to the largest crowd ever assembled in New York City to that
date.
Nearly
one and a half million met in Central Park, May 21, 1944, for the
annual "I Am an American Day," including 150,000 newly naturalized
citizens about to swear their oath of allegiance to the United States.
After
comments by Mayor LaGuardia, Senator Wagner and clergymen of
Protestant, Catholic and Jewish faiths, Judge Learned Hand gave his
short speech, 'The Spirit of Liberty,' which was reprinted in
The New Yorker, The New York Times, Life Magazine and
Readers Digest.
Judge Learned Hand stated:
"We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion.
Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same...
We sought liberty; freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves..."
Judge Hand continued:
"I
often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon
constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe
me, these are false hopes.
Liberty lies in the hearts of men
and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can
even do much to help it..."
Hand went on:
"And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women?
It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes.
That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow.
A
society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes
a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we
have learned to our sorrow."
Hand added:
"What then is the spirit of liberty?
I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith.
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 mind of other men and women;
the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias;
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 two thousand years
ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite
forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard
and considered side by side with the greatest."
Judge Learned Hand ended, after which he led everyone in the Pledge of Allegiance:
"In the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all;
in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying;
in
that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me
pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country."
Get your own copy of the best-selling America's God and Country Encyclopedia of QuotationsJudge Learned Hand wrote:
"The
use of history is to tell us...past themes, else we should have to
repeat, each in his own experience, the successes and the failures of
our forebears."
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