Judge Learned Hand and the Role of the Federal Judiciary

Judge Learned Hand and the Role of the Federal Judiciary
Author: Kathryn P. Griffith
Publisher: Norman : University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 1973
Genre: Judicial power
ISBN:

Learned Hand was a federal judge from 1909 to 1951. He served for fifteen years as a district court judge and for twenty,seven years as judge of the United States Circuit Court, Second Circuit, sitting in New York City. This text reviews his opinions especially those relating to the proper function of the federal courts and his defense of the doctrine of judicial restraint.

Learned Hand

Learned Hand
Author: Gerald Gunther
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 724
Release: 2010-06-24
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0199703434

Billings Learned Hand was one of the most influential judges in America. In Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge, Gerald Gunther provides a complete and intimate account of the professional and personal life of Learned Hand. He conveys the substance and range of Hand's judicial and intellectual contributions with eloquence and grace. This second edition features photos of Learned Hand throughout his life and career, and includes a foreword by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Gunther, a former law clerk for Hand, reviewed much of Hand's published work, opinions, and correspondence. He meticulously describes Hand's cases, and discusses the judge's professional and personal life as interconnected with the political and social circumstances of the times in which he lived. Born in 1872, Hand served on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He clearly crafted and delivered thousands of decisions in a wide range of cases through extensive, conscientious investigation and analysis, while at the same time exercising wisdom and personal detachment. His opinions are still widely quoted today, and will remain as an everlasting tribute to his life and legacy.

Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction

Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction
Author: Pamela Brandwein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2011-02-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1139496964

American constitutional lawyers and legal historians routinely assert that the Supreme Court's state action doctrine halted Reconstruction in its tracks. But it didn't. Rethinking the Judicial Settlement of Reconstruction demolishes the conventional wisdom - and puts a constructive alternative in its place. Pamela Brandwein unveils a lost jurisprudence of rights that provided expansive possibilities for protecting blacks' physical safety and electoral participation, even as it left public accommodation rights undefended. She shows that the Supreme Court supported a Republican coalition and left open ample room for executive and legislative action. Blacks were abandoned, but by the president and Congress, not the Court. Brandwein unites close legal reading of judicial opinions (some hitherto unknown), sustained historical work, the study of political institutions, and the sociology of knowledge. This book explodes tired old debates and will provoke new ones.

Henry Friendly, Greatest Judge of His Era

Henry Friendly, Greatest Judge of His Era
Author: David M. Dorsen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2012-04-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0674064933

Henry Friendly is frequently grouped with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, and Learned Hand as the best American jurists of the twentieth century. In this first, comprehensive biography of Friendly, Dorsen opens a unique window onto how a judge of this caliber thinks and decides cases, and how Friendly lived his life.

The Spirit of Liberty

The Spirit of Liberty
Author: Learned Hand
Publisher:
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1959
Genre: Ciencias polĂ­ticas
ISBN:

Learned Hand, by general consent, is one of the most distinguished living Americans. It seemed to Irving Dillard, editor of the editorial page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1949-57), that Judge Hand's non-legal addresses and papers ought to be available in volume form -- and this book is the result. Here, in speeches and articles covering a time-span of sixty-five years, is one of the truly liberal, incisive, and human voices of American life. On such subjects as justice, tolerance, democracy, liberty; on such men as Holmes, Brandeis, Cardozo, Stone, and Hughes; on the preservation of personality, the existence of a common will, the meaning of Americanism -- Judge Hand's living words are creative words with profound and enduring significance. Irving Dillard has supplied an Introduction that is a tribute to Learned Hand, and has prefaced each one of the forty-one addresses and papers with an informative note. The Spirit of Liberty is a heartening book for all Americans.

The Nature of the Judicial Process

The Nature of the Judicial Process
Author: Benjamin Nathan Cardozo
Publisher:
Total Pages: 218
Release: 1921
Genre: Judges
ISBN:

In this famous treatise, a Supreme Court Justice describes the conscious and unconscious processes by which a judge decides a case. He discusses the sources of information to which he appeals for guidance and analyzes the contribution that considerations of precedent, logical consistency, custom, social welfare, and standards of justice and morals have in shaping his decisions.

Judges and Their Audiences

Judges and Their Audiences
Author: Lawrence Baum
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2009-01-10
Genre: Law
ISBN: 140082754X

What motivates judges as decision makers? Political scientist Lawrence Baum offers a new perspective on this crucial question, a perspective based on judges' interest in the approval of audiences important to them. The conventional scholarly wisdom holds that judges on higher courts seek only to make good law, good policy, or both. In these theories, judges are influenced by other people only in limited ways, in consequence of their legal and policy goals. In contrast, Baum argues that the influence of judges' audiences is pervasive. This influence derives from judges' interest in popularity and respect, a motivation central to most people. Judges care about the regard of audiences because they like that regard in itself, not just as a means to other ends. Judges and Their Audiences uses research in social psychology to make the case that audiences shape judges' choices in substantial ways. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship on judicial decision-making and an array of empirical evidence, the book then analyzes the potential and actual impact of several audiences, including the public, other branches of government, court colleagues, the legal profession, and judges' social peers. Engagingly written, this book provides a deeper understanding of key issues concerning judicial behavior on which scholars disagree, identifies aspects of judicial behavior that diverge from the assumptions of existing models, and shows how those models can be strengthened.

Reflections on Judging

Reflections on Judging
Author: Richard A. Posner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2013-10-07
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0674184653

In Reflections on Judging, Richard Posner distills the experience of his thirty-one years as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Surveying how the judiciary has changed since his 1981 appointment, he engages the issues at stake today, suggesting how lawyers should argue cases and judges decide them, how trials can be improved, and, most urgently, how to cope with the dizzying pace of technological advance that makes litigation ever more challenging to judges and lawyers. For Posner, legal formalism presents one of the main obstacles to tackling these problems. Formalist judges--most notably Justice Antonin Scalia--needlessly complicate the legal process by advocating "canons of constructions" (principles for interpreting statutes and the Constitution) that are confusing and self-contradictory. Posner calls instead for a renewed commitment to legal realism, whereby a good judge gathers facts, carefully considers context, and comes to a sensible conclusion that avoids inflicting collateral damage on other areas of the law. This, Posner believes, was the approach of the jurists he most admires and seeks to emulate: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly, and it is an approach that can best resolve our twenty-first-century legal disputes.

Judging Statutes

Judging Statutes
Author: Robert A. Katzmann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2014-08-14
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0199362149

In an ideal world, the laws of Congress--known as federal statutes--would always be clearly worded and easily understood by the judges tasked with interpreting them. But many laws feature ambiguous or even contradictory wording. How, then, should judges divine their meaning? Should they stick only to the text? To what degree, if any, should they consult aids beyond the statutes themselves? Are the purposes of lawmakers in writing law relevant? Some judges, such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, believe courts should look to the language of the statute and virtually nothing else. Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit respectfully disagrees. In Judging Statutes, Katzmann, who is a trained political scientist as well as a judge, argues that our constitutional system charges Congress with enacting laws; therefore, how Congress makes its purposes known through both the laws themselves and reliable accompanying materials should be respected. He looks at how the American government works, including how laws come to be and how various agencies construe legislation. He then explains the judicial process of interpreting and applying these laws through the demonstration of two interpretative approaches, purposivism (focusing on the purpose of a law) and textualism (focusing solely on the text of the written law). Katzmann draws from his experience to show how this process plays out in the real world, and concludes with some suggestions to promote understanding between the courts and Congress. When courts interpret the laws of Congress, they should be mindful of how Congress actually functions, how lawmakers signal the meaning of statutes, and what those legislators expect of courts construing their laws. The legislative record behind a law is in truth part of its foundation, and therefore merits consideration.

Courts on Trial

Courts on Trial
Author: Jerome Frank
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 1973-09-21
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780691027555

CONTENTS: I. The Needless Mystery of Court House Government. II. Fights and Rights. III. Facts Are Guesses. IV. Modern Legal Magic. V. Wizards and Lawyers. VI. The "Fight" Theory versus the "Truth" Theory. VII. The Procedural Reformers. VIII. The Jury System. IX. Defenses of the Jury System--Suggested Reforms. X. Are Judges Human? XI. Psychological Approaches. XII. Criticism of Trial-Court Decisions--The Gestalt. XIII. A Trial as a Communicative Process. XIV. "Legal Science" and "Legal Engineering." XV. The Upper-Court Myth. XVI. Legal Education. XVII. Special Training for Trial Judges. XVIII. The Cult of the Robe. XIX. Precedents and Stability. XX. Codification. XXI. Words and Music: Legislation and Judicial Interpretation. XXII. Constitutions--The Merry-Go-Round. XIII. Legal Reasoning. XXIV. Da Capo. XXV. The Anthropological Approach. XXVI. Natural Law. XXVII. The Psychology of Litigants. XXVIII. The Unblindfolding of Justice. XXIX. Classicism and Romanticism. XXX. Justice and Emotions. XXXI. Questioning Some Legal Axioms. XXXII. Reason and Unreason--Ideals.