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Title: Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge by Gerald Gunther ISBN: 0-394-58807-X Publisher: Random House Inc Pub. Date: 01 May, 1994 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: I Thought It Was Great
Comment: This is an outstanding biography written by one who is a true legal scholar in his own right. Gunther's understanding and insight into the legal issues surrounding the life of Learned Hand made reading this book a fine experience.
Rating: 1
Summary: insufferably boring.
Comment: notwithstanding Justice Powell's glowing introduction, reading this book is like wading through cold oatmeal. anyone who can endure this avalanche of turgid prose to mine those incredibly few nuggets of interesting information about this great judge is a dedicated person indeed. save your money.
Rating: 2
Summary: Assumes too much...
Comment: First, I would note that the purely biographical portions of the book are solid. They are well researched and supported by abundant original sources such as letters, speeches and judicial opinions. The primary glaring errors in the biographical aspect of the book are (1) the author refuses to accept Hand's own analysis of his view of judicial review as manifest in his final lectures at Harvard. Instead he accuses Justice Frankfurter (his well-meaning villian of all occasions) as skewing Judge Hand's understanding of Brown v. Board of Education (which Hand criticised as judicial usurpation). The author can't accept that position because he doesn't believe it and, therefor, Hand must not have either. (2) There is no mention, other than one line in the forward, of Hand's most important contribution to law, the Hand formula used in tort analysis of negligence. I think the reason is because the author opposes the Law and Economics crowd and doesn't want to highlight Hand's most powerful contribution to them. Still, these are two glaring errors and reduce the value of the book significantly.
The other portions of the book are very poorly developed. I am speaking of the historical contextual aspects that any biographer must provide to make meaning out of a biography. The unfortunate tendency of this author is to provide conclusory statements about historical, economic, political and social issues without ANY substantive support. His solid practice of providing regular original source material for the biographical portions is sadly lacking in the contextual sections. That's unfortunate because the author is just plain wrong in several instances. Most biographers do go to the trouble of providing contextual, historical justifications for their blanket statements, but those that don't usually instead avoid providing any analysis and confine themselves to the facts, supplemented by the subject's letters or statements about it. So, for instance, we are informed that one of the "underlying causes" of the Great Depression was the "smugness" of the monied interests. That's an interesting "underlying" cause of an economic disaster. In another location we are instructed that conservaivtes were generally narrow and shallow and that although many of Hand's positions on certain political and legal issues were in conjunction with conservatives, they were held by Hand because of fidelity to his understanding of the Constitution while conservatives held them for reasons of race or personal gain and hid behind Constitutional claims. This is the simplest form of character assassination, not to mention intellectual tripe. There are multiple instances of this bias running through the book. Whenever Hand moved to the left he was "expanding" or "growing". Whenever he moved to the right (to the extent the author doesn't explain it away as something it clearly wasn't) he was in danger of "hardening". This kind of writing is poor, but, unfortunately, as previous reviewers here make clear, it slips right by readers and into their mind as accurate. I would ask Mr. Gunther to cross his campus to the office of Thomas Sowell and engage him in conversation prior to denouncing conservatives as narrow. He is simply a liberal bigot.
Taken all in all, the book may deserve slightly higher marks than I have given it. As a relation of Hand's life experiences it is quite good, but it suffers significantly from the author's unfounded political preconceptions.
-Kelly Whiting
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Title: The Story of My Life by Clarence Darrow, Alan M. Dershowitz ISBN: 0306807386 Publisher: Da Capo Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1996 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Introduction to the Study and Practice of Law in a Nutshell (Nutshell) by Kenney F. Hegland ISBN: 031414644X Publisher: West Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self by G. Edward White ISBN: 0195101286 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1995 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Cardozo by Andrew L. Kaufman ISBN: 0674001923 Publisher: Harvard University Press Pub. Date: 07 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Common Law by Oliver W. Holmes ISBN: 0486267466 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 July, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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