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29 Brook. L. Rev. 6 (1962-1963)
Learned Hand: An Expression from the Second Circuit

handle is hein.journals/brklr29 and id is 16 raw text is: BROOKLYN LAW REVIEW LEARNED HAND: AN EXPRESSION FROM THE SECOND CIRCUIT HENRY J. FRENDLY A NY verbal appreciation of Judge Learned Hand is an attempt to express the ineffable. The tools of the painter or the sculptor, even of the skilled photographer, are more apt to portray the character of the man, which transcended his greatest work. If words perforce must be the medium, the poet or the philosopher might do better than the lawyer or the judge. Beyond this, there is always the danger, noted in the most famed of all memorials: On the one hand, the friend who is familiar with every fact of the story, may think that some point has not been set forth with that fullness which he wishes and knows it to deserve; on the other, he who is a stranger to the matter may be led by envy to suspect exag- geration if he hears anything above his own nature. Still the task imposes itself, especially on those who knew Judge Hand, nd who labored with him, however briefly. Mr. Justice Frankfurter made the point to me in a letter written a few days after the Judge's death: You have had the great good fortune of association with a personality such that you will not again encounter his like, nor will your grand- children unless you imaginatively recreate hiia for them. I doubt that anyone could do that adequately; I know that I cannot. But a multitude of voices may reach beyond the range of any single one; the orchestra can pour forth both a harmony and a .counterpoint that no instrument could yield alone. In this non- iEuclidean age it is no longer heresy to assert that the whole may ,exceed the sum of its parts. And, against Pericles' somewhat cynical -view of memorials, we may fittingly oppose Judge Hand's own -words in his tribute to Cardozo: He is gone, and while the west is :still lighted with his radiance, it is well for us to pause and take -count of our own coarser selves.2 No oracular gifts are required for the prophecy that when the 'history of American law in the first half of this century comes to .be written, four judges will tower above the rest-Holmes, Brandeis, ,Cardozo and Learned Hand. True, as the day wore on, other sum- IThucYrDIDEs, THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR 103 (Modern Library ed. 1934). 2 HAND, THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY 133 (3d ed. enlarged, 1960).

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