Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart (18 July 1907 – 19 December 1992) was an influential legal philosopher of the 20th century. He was Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University and the Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. He wrote The Concept of Law.

Biographical sketch[link]

Hart was born in 1907, the son of a prosperous Jewish tailor of German and Polish origin. Educated at Cheltenham College, Bradford Grammar School and at New College, Oxford, Hart took an outstanding First in Classical Greats in 1929.^[1]

He became a Barrister and practised successfully at the Chancery Bar from 1932 to 1940 and was good friends with Richard (later Lord) Wilberforce. He received a Harmsworth Scholarship to the Middle Temple and also wrote literary journalism for the periodical John O'London's Weekly.^[1]

During World War II, Hart worked with MI5, a division of British military intelligence, where he renewed Oxford friendships including working with the philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Stuart Hampshire. He did not return to his legal practice after the War, preferring instead to accept the offer of a teaching fellowship (in philosophy, not Law) at New College, Oxford. Hart cites J. L. Austin as particularly influential during this time.^[1]

In 1952, he was elected Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford. He retired from the Chair in 1969 and was succeeded by Ronald Dworkin. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1959 to 1960.

Hart married Jenifer Williams, a senior civil servant in the Home Office and, later, Oxford historian at St Anne's College (specializing in the history of the police). Jenifer Hart, a 'sleeper' member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, later came under suspicion of having passed information to the Soviets.^[2] The Harts had four children, including a son who was disabled. The marriage contained "incompatible personalities", and Hart confessed to his daughter that "[t]he trouble with this marriage is that one of us doesn't like sex and the other doesn't like food."^[3] Jenifer Hart was believed by her contemporaries to have had an affair of long duration with Isaiah Berlin, a close friend of Hart's. Jenifer published her memoirs under the title Ask Me No More in 1998.

There is a description of their household by the writer on religion Karen Armstrong, who lodged with them for a time, in her book The Spiral Staircase.^[4]

Hart's students[link]

Many of Hart's former students became important legal, moral, and political philosophers, including Brian Barry, John Finnis, Kent Greenawalt, Neil MacCormick, Joseph Raz, Chin Liew Ten, W. J. Waluchow, and Ronald Dworkin. Hart also had a strong influence on the young John Rawls in the 1950s, when Rawls was a visiting scholar at Oxford shortly after finishing his PhD.

Philosophical method[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Hart revolutionized the methods of jurisprudence and the philosophy of law in the English-speaking world. Influenced by John Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hart brought the tools of analytic, and especially linguistic, philosophy to bear on the central problems of legal theory. Hart's method combined the careful analysis of twentieth-century analytic philosophy with the jurisprudential tradition of Jeremy Bentham, the great English legal, political, and moral philosopher. Hart's conception of law had parallels to the Pure Theory of Law formulated by Austrian legal philosopher Hans Kelsen, though Hart rejected several distinctive features of Kelsen's theory. Hart drew on Glanville Williams: Glanville Williams demonstrated his skill as a legal philosopher in a five-part article, ‘Language and the Law’ and a paper, ‘International Law and the Controversy concerning the word “Law”. In the paper on international law, he sharply attacked the many jurists and international lawyers who had debated whether international law was ‘really’ law. They had been wasting everyone's time, for the question was not a factual one, the many differences between municipal and international law being undeniable, but was simply one of conventional verbal usage, about which individual the¬orists could please themselves, but had no right to dictate to others. This approach was to be refined and developed by H. L. A. Hart in the last chapter of The Concept of Law (1961) which showed how the use in respect of different social phenomena of an abstract word like “law” reflected the fact that these phenomena each shared, without necessarily all possess¬ing in common, some distinctive features. Glanville had himself said as much when editing a student text on jurisprudence and he had adopted essentially the same approach to ‘The Definition of Crime’ .^{[citation needed]}

[edit] The Concept of Law

Hart's most famous work is The Concept of Law, first published in 1961, and with a second edition (including a new postscript) published posthumously in 1994. The book emerged from a set of lectures that Hart began to deliver in 1952, and it is presaged by his Holmes lecture, Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals delivered at Harvard Law School. The Concept of Law developed a sophisticated view of legal positivism. Among the many ideas developed in this book are:

• A critique of John Austin's theory that law is the command of the sovereign backed by the threat of punishment.
• A distinction between primary and secondary legal rules, where a primary rule governs conduct and a secondary rule allows of the creation, alteration, or extinction of primary rules.
• A distinction between the internal and external points of view of law and rules, close to (and influenced by) Max Weber's distinction between the sociological and the legal perspectives upon law.
• The idea of the Rule of Recognition, a social rule that differentiates between those norms that have the authority of law and those that do not.
• A late reply (published as a postscript to the second edition) to Ronald Dworkin, who criticized legal positivism in Taking Rights Seriously (1977), A Matter of Principle (1985) and Law's Empire (1986).

Other work[link]

With Tony Honoré, Hart wrote Causation in the Law (1959, second edition 1985), which is regarded as one of the important academic discussions of Causation in the legal context.

As a result of his famous debate with Patrick Devlin, Baron Devlin on the role of the criminal law in enforcing moral norms, Hart wrote Law, Liberty and Morality (1963) and The Morality of the Criminal Law (1965). Hart said that he believed Devlin's view of Mill's harm principle as it related to the decriminalization of homosexuality was "perverse". He later stated that he believed the reforms to the law regarding homosexuality that followed the Wolfenden report "didn't go far enough". Despite this, Hart reported later that he got on well personally with Devlin.^[1]

Hart gave lectures to the Labour Party on closing tax loopholes which were being used by the "super-rich". Hart considered himself to be "on the Left, the non-communist Left", and expressed animosity towards Margaret Thatcher.^[1]

Writings[link]

• "The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights". Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1949.
• Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence (1953)
• Causation in the Law (with Tony Honoré) (1959)
• The Concept of Law Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1961.
• Law, Liberty and Morality (1963)
• The Morality of the Criminal Law (1964)
• Punishment and Responsibility (1968)
• Essays on Bentham: Studies in Jurisprudence and Political Theory (1982)
• Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (1983)

Festschrift[link]

• Law, Morality, and Society: Essays in Honour of H. L. A. Hart, edited by P. M. S. Hacker and Joseph Raz (1977)

See also[link]

• Hart-Dworkin debate
• Hart-Fuller debate (Lon Fuller)
• Legal interpretivism
• Legal positivism
• Natural law
• Philosophy of law

Bibliography[link]

• Nicola Lacey A Life of H. L. A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream, Oxford University Press: 2004 (ISBN 0-19-927497-5).
• Frederick Schauer "(Re)Taking Hart," 119 Harv. L. Rev. 852 (2006) (reviewing Lacey, "A Life of H. L. A. Hart").
• Karen Armstrong The Spiral Staircase, Harper Collins, 2004 (ISBN 0-00-712228-4)
• Carlin Romano "A Philosopher's Humanity", Chronicle of Higher Education vol. 51 (2005) (reviewing Lacey, "A Life of H. L. A. Hart") link

References[link]

External links[link]

• A biography
• Short Biography by Tony Honoré
• A Life of HLA Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream

H. L. Mencken
Born	Henry Louis Mencken (1880-09-12)September 12, 1880 Baltimore, Maryland
Died	January 29, 1956(1956-01-29) (aged 75) Baltimore, Maryland
Nationality	American
Ethnicity	German American
Occupation	Journalist, satirist, critic
Notable credit(s)	The Baltimore Sun
Influenced	Paul Fussell, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand
Spouse	Sara Haardt
Relatives	August Mencken, Jr. Brother
Family	August Mencken, Sr. Father

Henry Louis "H. L." Mencken (September 12, 1880 - January 29, 1956), was an American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, critic of American life and culture, and a scholar of American English.^[1] Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century. Many of his books still remain in print.

Mencken is known for writing The American Language, a multi-volume study of how the English language is spoken in the United States, and for his satirical reporting on the Scopes trial, which he dubbed the "Monkey Trial". He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, pseudo-experts, the temperance movement, and uplifters. A keen cheerleader of scientific progress, he was very skeptical of economic theories and particularly critical of anti-intellectualism, bigotry, populism, Christian fundamentalism, creationism, organized religion, the existence of God, and osteopathic/chiropractic medicine.

In addition to his literary accomplishments, Mencken was known for his controversial ideas. A frank admirer of Nietzsche, he was not a proponent of representative democracy, which he believed was a system in which inferior men dominated their superiors.^[2] During and after World War One, he was sympathetic to the Germans, and was very distrustful of British "propaganda".^[3] However, he overcame his inclination to embrace all things Bavarian, referring to Hitler and his followers as "ignorant thugs". He was an ardent opponent of any religious practices or institutions.^[4]

Early life[link]

Mencken was the son of August Mencken, Sr., a cigar factory owner of German extraction. When Henry was three, his family moved into a new home at 1524 Hollins Street, in the Union Square neighborhood of Baltimore. Apart from five years of married life, Mencken was to live in that house for the rest of his life.^[5]

In his best-selling memoir Happy Days, he described his childhood in Baltimore as "placid, secure, uneventful and happy."^[6]

When he was nine years old, he read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, which he later described as "the most stupendous event in my life".^[7] He determined to become a writer himself. He read prodigiously. In one winter while in high school he read Thackeray and "then proceeded backward to Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Johnson and the other magnificos of the Eighteenth century". He read the entire canon of Shakespeare, and became an ardent fan of Kipling and Thomas Huxley.^[8] But as a boy Mencken also had practical interests, photography and chemistry in particular, and eventually had a home chemistry laboratory which he used to perform experiments of his own devising, some of them inadvertently dangerous.^[9]

After graduating (with honors) from high school at the age of sixteen, he worked for three years in his father's cigar factory. He disliked this work, especially the selling part, and resolved to leave, with or without his father's blessing. In early 1898, he took a class in writing at one of the country's first correspondence schools (the Cosmopolitan University).^[10] This was to be all of Mencken's formal education in journalism, or indeed in any other subject. On his father's death a few days after Christmas in the same year, the business reverted to his uncle, and Mencken was free to pursue his career in journalism. He applied in February, 1899, to the Baltimore Morning Herald newspaper, and was hired as a part-timer there, but still kept his position at the factory for a few months. In June he was hired on as a full-time reporter, and his new career was well underway.

Career[link]

After six years at the Herald Mencken moved to The Baltimore Sun, where he worked for Charles H. Grasty. He continued to contribute to the Sun full time until 1948, when he ceased to write there following a stroke.

Mencken began writing the editorials and opinion pieces that made his name. On the side, he wrote short stories, a novel, and even poetry–which he later reviled. In 1908, he became a literary critic for the magazine The Smart Set, and in 1924, he and George Jean Nathan founded and edited The American Mercury, published by Alfred A. Knopf. It soon developed a national circulation and became highly influential on college campuses across America. In 1933, Mencken resigned as editor.

Personal life[link]

In 1930, Mencken married Sara Haardt, a professor of English at Goucher College in Baltimore and an author who was eighteen years his junior. Haardt had led efforts in Alabama to ratify the 19th Amendment.^[11] The two met in 1923, after Mencken delivered a lecture at Goucher; a seven-year courtship ensued. The marriage made national headlines, and many were surprised that Mencken, who once called marriage "the end of hope" and who was well known for mocking relations between the sexes, had gone to the altar. "The Holy Spirit informed and inspired me," Mencken said. "Like all other infidels, I am superstitious and always follow hunches: this one seemed to be a superb one."^[12] Even more startling, he was marrying an Alabama native, despite his having written scathing essays about the American South. Haardt was in poor health from tuberculosis throughout their marriage and died in 1935 of meningitis, leaving Mencken grief-stricken.^[13] He had always supported her writing, and after her death had a collection of her short stories published under the title Southern Album.

Mencken photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932

During the Great Depression, Mencken did not support the New Deal. This cost him popularity, as did his strong reservations regarding U.S. participation in World War Two, and his overt contempt for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He ceased writing for the Baltimore Sun for several years, focusing on his memoirs and other projects as editor, while serving as an advisor for the paper that had been his home for nearly his entire career. In 1948, he briefly returned to the political scene, covering the presidential election in which President Harry S. Truman faced Republican Thomas Dewey and Henry A. Wallace of the Progressive Party. His later work consisted of humorous, anecdotal, and nostalgic essays, first published in The New Yorker, then collected in the books Happy Days, Newspaper Days, and Heathen Days.

On November 23, 1948, Mencken suffered a stroke that left him aware and fully conscious but nearly unable to read or write, and able to speak only with some difficulty. After his stroke, Mencken enjoyed listening to European classical music and, after some recovery of his ability to speak, talking with friends, but he sometimes referred to himself in the past tense, as if already dead. Preoccupied as he was with his legacy, he organized his papers, letters, newspaper clippings and columns, even grade school report cards. These materials were made available to scholars after his death in stages in 1971, 1981 and 1991, and include hundreds of thousands of letters sent and received–the only omissions were strictly personal letters received from women.

Mencken died in his sleep on January 29, 1956.^[14] He was interred in Baltimore's Loudon Park Cemetery.^[15]

Though it does not appear on his tombstone, during his Smart Set days Mencken wrote a joking epitaph for himself:

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.^[16][17]

The man of ideas[link]

In his capacity as editor and man of ideas, Mencken became close friends with the leading literary figures of his time, including Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Hergesheimer, Anita Loos, Ben Hecht, Sinclair Lewis, James Branch Cabell and Alfred Knopf, as well as a mentor to several young reporters, including Alistair Cooke. He also championed artists whose works he considered worthy. For example, he asserted that books such as Caught Short! A Saga of Wailing Wall Street (1929), by Eddie Cantor (ghost-written by David Freedman) did more to pull America out of the Great Depression than all government measures combined. He also mentored John Fante.

Mencken also published many works under various pseudonyms, including Owen Hatteras, John H. Brownell, William Drayham, W.L.D. Bell, and Charles Angofff.^[18] As a ghost-writer for the physician Leonard K. Hirshberg, he wrote a series of articles and (in 1910) most of the book about the care for babies.

Mencken frankly admired Friedrich Nietzsche—he was the first writer to provide a scholarly analysis in English of Nietzsche's writings and philosophy—and Joseph Conrad. His humor and satire owe much to Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain. He did much to defend Theodore Dreiser, despite freely admitting his faults, including stating forthrightly that Dreiser often wrote badly and was a gullible man. Mencken also expressed his appreciation for William Graham Sumner in a 1941 collection of Sumner's essays, and regretted never having known Sumner personally.

Mencken recommended for publication the first novel by Ayn Rand, We the Living, calling it "a really excellent piece of work". Shortly after, Rand addressed him in correspondence as "the greatest representative of a philosophy", to which she wanted to dedicate her life, "individualism", and, later, listed him as her favorite columnist.^[19]

For Mencken, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the finest work of American literature. Much of that book relates how gullible and ignorant country "boobs" (as Mencken referred to them) are swindled by confidence men like the (deliberately) pathetic "Duke" and "Dauphin" roustabouts with whom Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi River. These scam-artists swindle by posing as enlightened speakers on temperance (to obtain the funds to get roaring drunk), as pious "saved" men seeking funds for far off evangelistic missions (to pirates on the high seas, no less), and as learned doctors of phrenology (who can barely spell). Mencken read the novel as a story of America's hilarious dark side, a place where democracy, as defined by Mencken, is "the worship of jackals by jackasses".

As a nationally syndicated columnist and book author, he famously spoke out against Christian Science, social stigma, fakery, Christian radicalism, religious belief (and as a fervent nonbeliever the very notion of a Deity), osteopathy, antievolutionism, chiropractic, and the "Booboisie", his word for the ignorant middle classes.^[20][21][22] In 1926, he deliberately had himself arrested for selling an issue of The American Mercury that was banned in Boston under the Comstock laws.^[23] Mencken heaped scorn not only on the public officials he disliked, but also on the contemporary state of American republicanism itself. In 1931, the Arkansas legislature passed a motion to pray for Mencken's soul after he had called the state the "apex of moronia".^[24]

Musical interests[link]

Mencken had a great interest in music, playing the piano and favoring the works of Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Bach. His favorite piece of music was the first movement of Beethoven's Third "Eroica" Symphony. He was a member of Baltimore's Saturday Night Club, an assemblage which gathered weekly to play together and drink beer.

Views[link]

The striking thing about Mencken’s mind is its ruthlessness and rigidity . . . Though one of the fairest of critics, he is the least pliant . . . . [I]n spite of his skepticism, and his frequent exhortations to hold his opinion lightly, he himself has been conspicuous for seizing upon simple dogmas and sticking to them with fierce tenacity . . . true skeptics . . . see both truth and weakness in every case.

— Literary critic Edmund Wilson (1921)^[25]

In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic's Hell.

— H.L. Mencken (Source)^[26]

Elitism[link]

Instead of arguing that one race or group was superior to another, Mencken believed that every community produced a few people of clear superiority. He considered groupings on a par with hierarchies, which led to a kind of natural elitism and natural aristocracy. "Superior" individuals, in Mencken's view, were those wrongly oppressed and disdained by their own communities, but nevertheless distinguished by their will and personal achievement—not by race or birth.

In 1989, per his instructions, Alfred A. Knopf published Mencken's "secret diary" as The Diary of H. L. Mencken. According to an item in the South Bay (California) Daily Breeze on December 5, 1989, entitled "Mencken's Secret Diary Shows Racist Leanings", Mencken's views shocked even the "sympathetic scholar who edited it", Charles A. Fecher of Baltimore.^[27] There was a club in Baltimore called the Maryland Club which had one Jewish member, and that member died. Mencken said, "There is no other Jew in Baltimore who seems suitable", according to the article. And the diary quoted him as saying of blacks, in 1943, "it is impossible to talk anything resembling discretion or judgment to a colored woman". However, violence against blacks outraged Mencken. For example, he had this to say about a Maryland lynching:

Not a single bigwig came forward in the emergency, though the whole town knew what was afoot. Any one of a score of such bigwigs might have halted the crime, if only by threatening to denounce its perpetrators, but none spoke. So Williams was duly hanged, burned and mutilated.

Democracy[link]

Rather than dismissing democratic governance as a popular fallacy or treating it with open contempt, Mencken's response to it was a publicized sense of amusement. His feelings on this subject (like his casual feelings on many other such subjects) are sprinkled throughout his writings over the years, very occasionally taking center-stage with the full force of Mencken's prose:

[D]emocracy gives [the beatification of mediocrity] a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world—that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters—which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.

This sentiment is fairly consistent with Mencken's distaste for common notions and the philosophical outlook he unabashedly set down throughout his life as a writer (drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer, among others).^[28]

Mencken wrote as follows about the difficulties of good men reaching national office when such campaigns must necessarily be conducted remotely:

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.^[29]

Anglo-Saxons[link]

Mencken countered the arguments for Anglo-Saxon superiority prevalent in his time in a 1923 essay entitled "The Anglo-Saxon," which argued that if there was such a thing as a pure "Anglo-Saxon" race, it was defined by its inferiority and cowardice. "The normal American of the 'pure-blooded' majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen."^[30]

Jews[link]

Mencken's views towards Jews appeared to evolve with time. In the 1930 edition of Treatise on the Gods Mencken wrote:

The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered, they lack many of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.^[31]

This passage was removed from subsequent editions at his express direction.^[32]

Moreover, he viewed Adolf Hitler as a buffoon, and once compared him to a common Ku Klux Klan member. In an open letter to Upton Sinclair, published in the June, 1936, issue of The American Mercury, Mencken wrote, "You protest, and with justice, each time Hitler jails an opponent; but you forget that Stalin and company have jailed and murdered a thousand times as many. It seems to me, and indeed the evidence is plain, that compared to the Moscow brigands and assassins, Hitler is hardly more than a common Ku Kluxer and Mussolini almost a philanthropist."

Author Gore Vidal later defended Mencken:

Far from being an anti-Semite, Mencken was one of the first journalists to denounce the persecution of the Jews in Germany at a time when the New York Times, say, was notoriously reticent. On November 27, 1938, Mencken writes (Baltimore Sun), "It is to be hoped that the poor Jews now being robbed and mauled in Germany will not take too seriously the plans of various politicians to rescue them." He then reviews the various schemes to "rescue" the Jews from the Nazis, who had not yet announced their own final solution.^[33]

As Hitler gradually conquered Europe, Mencken attacked President Franklin D. Roosevelt for refusing to admit Jewish refugees into the United States and called for their wholesale admission:

There is only one way to help the fugitives, and that is to find places for them in a country in which they can really live. Why shouldn't the United States take in a couple hundred thousand of them, or even all of them?^[34]

Memorials[link]

Home[link]

Mencken's home at 1524 Hollins Street, where he lived for sixty-seven years before his death in 1956, in Baltimore's Union Square neighborhood was bequeathed to the University of Maryland, Baltimore on the death of Mencken's younger brother, August, in 1967. The City of Baltimore acquired the property in 1983, and the "H. L. Mencken House" became part of the City Life Museums. The house has been closed to general admission since 1997, but is opened for special events and group visits by arrangement.

Library[link]

Shortly after World War Two, Mencken expressed his intention of bequeathing his books and papers to Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library. At the time of his death in 1956, the Library was in possession of most of the present large collection. As a result, Mencken's papers as well as much of his library, which includes many books inscribed by major authors, are held in the Central Branch of the Pratt Library on Cathedral Street in Baltimore. The original H.L. Mencken Room and Collection, on the third floor, housing this collection, was dedicated on April 17, 1956. The new Mencken Room, on the first floor of the Library's Annex, was opened in November, 2003.

The collection contains Mencken's typescripts, his newspaper and magazine contributions, his published books, family documents and memorabilia, clipping books, a large collection of presentation volumes, a file of correspondence with prominent Marylanders, and the extensive material he collected while preparing The American Language.

Other collections of Menckenia are at Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Yale University. The Sara Haardt Mencken collection is at Goucher College, which includes letters written between Sara Haardt and Mencken and condolence letters written after her death. Some of Mencken's vast literary correspondence is held at the New York Public Library.

Works[link]

Books

• George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905)
• The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1907)
• The Gist of Nietzsche (1910)
• Men versus the Man: a Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist and H. L. Mencken, Individualist (1910)
• A Book of Burlesques (1916)
• A Little Book in C Major (1916)
• A Book of Prefaces (1917)
• In Defense of Women (1918)
• Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918)
• The American Language (1919)
• Prejudices (1919–27)
  • First Series (1919)
  • Second Series (1920)
  • Third Series (1922)
  • Fourth Series (1924)
  • Fifth Series (1926)
  • Sixth Series (1927)
  • Selected Prejudices (1927)
• Notes on Democracy (1926)
• Menckeneana: A Schimpflexikon (1928) - Editor
• Treatise on the Gods (1930)
• Making a President (1932)
• Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934)
• Happy Days, 1880–1892 (1940)
• Newspaper Days, 1899–1906 (1941)
• Heathen Days, 1890–1936 (1943)
• Christmas Story (1944)
• The American Language, Supplement I (1945)
• The American Language, Supplement II (1948)
• A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Posthumous collections

• Minority Report (1956)
• On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe (1956)
• The American Scene (1965) (Huntington Cairns, ed).
• The Bathtub Hoax and Blasts & Bravos from the Chicago Tribune (1958)
• The Impossible H. L. Mencken: A Selection Of His Best Newspaper Stories (1991) (Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, ed).
• My Life As Author and Editor (1992) (Jonathan Yardley, ed).
• A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (1994)
• Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work (1996)
• A Religious Orgy in Tennessee A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial (2006) (Melville House Publishing).

Chapbooks, pamphlets, and notable essays

• Ventures into Verse (1903)
• The Artist: A Drama Without Words (1912)
• The Creed of a Novelist (1916)
• Pistols for Two (1917)
• The Sahara of the Bozart (1920)
• Gamalielese (1921)
• "The Hills of Zion" (1925)
• Libido for the Ugly (1927)

See also[link]

• Bathtub hoax

References[link]

Notes[link]

Sources[link]

• Goldberg, Isaac (1925) The Man Mencken: A Biographical and Critical Survey Simon and Shuster.
• Manchester, William (1951) Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H.L. Mencken Harper.
• Bode, Carl (1969) Mencken Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 8093-0376-0
• Hobson, Fred (1974) Serpent in Eden Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 0-8071-0292-X
• Stenerson, Douglas C. (1974) H. L. Mencken: Iconoclast from Baltimore University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-77249-7
• Scruggs, Charles (1984) The Sage in Harlem.
• Hobson, Fred (1994) Mencken: A Life. Random House. ISBN 0-8018-5238-2. Also published in paper back by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Teachout, Terry. (2002) The Skeptic : A Life of H. L. Mencken. Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-050528-1
• Rodgers, Marion Elizabeth (2005) Mencken: The American Iconoclast. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507238-3

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (February 2012)

Wikisource has original works written by or about: H. L. Mencken

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: H. L. Mencken

• Works by H. L. Mencken at Project Gutenberg
• H. L. Mencken at the Internet Movie Database
• The Mencken Society
• The H. L. Mencken Page
• Friends of the H. L. Mencken House
• Mencken's columns on the Scopes Trial at positiveatheism.org
• Podcast of HL Mencken's reports of the trial from the Baltimore Evening Sun
• "Bierce Duels with the Sage of Baltimore" by Don Swaim, from the Ambrose Bierce site.
• The Papers of the Wilton C. Dinges Collection (H.L. Mencken Collection) at Gettysburg College
• H. L. and Sara Haardt Mencken Collection at Goucher College
• Mencken and More on Lincoln's Speech.
• H.L. Mencken correspondence, Baltimore Sun records at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• FBI file on H. L. Mencken
• H.L. Mencken Letters at the Newberry Library
• Booknotes interview with Charles Fecher on The Diary of H.L. Mencken, January 28, 1990.
• H.L. Mencken at C-SPAN's American Writers: A Journey Through History

Ronald Myles Dworkin

Ronald Dworkin at the Brooklyn Book Festival.
Born	(1931-12-11) December 11, 1931 (age 80) Providence, Rhode Island
Era	20th/21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Jurisprudence, Political philosophy
Notable ideas	law as integrity, fit and justification in law, right answer thesis, legal interpretivism, rights as trumps
Influenced by Cross · Hand · Hart · Rawls
Influenced Alexy · Dyzenhaus · Kumm · Kymlicka · Leiter · Stavropoulos · Waldron

Ronald Myles Dworkin, FBA (born December 11, 1931) is an American philosopher and scholar of constitutional law. He is Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, and has taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford. An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact."^[1] According to a survey in The Journal of Legal Studies, Dworkin was the second most-cited American legal scholar of the twentieth century.^[2]

His theory of law as integrity, in which judges interpret the law in terms of consistent and communal moral principles, especially justice and fairness, is amongst the most influential contemporary theories about the nature of law. He advocates a "moral reading" of the United States Constitution,^[3] and an interpretivist approach to law and morality. He is a frequent commentator on contemporary political and legal issues, particularly those concerning the Supreme Court of the United States, often in the pages of The New York Review of Books.

Biography[link]

Ronald Dworkin was born in 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. He studied at Harvard University and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and a student of Sir Rupert Cross. After completing his final year's exams at Oxford, the examiners were so impressed with his script that the Chair of Jurisprudence (then H. L. A. Hart) was summoned to read it. Dworkin then attended Harvard Law School and subsequently clerked for Judge Learned Hand of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Judge Hand would later call Dworkin the finest clerk he ever employed, and Dworkin would recall Judge Hand as an enormously influential mentor. After working at Sullivan & Cromwell, a prominent law firm in New York City, Dworkin became a Professor of Law at Yale University, where he became the holder of the Wesley N. Hohfeld Chair of Jurisprudence.

In 1969, Dworkin was appointed to the Chair of Jurisprudence at Oxford, a position in which he succeeded H. L. A. Hart, and elected Fellow of University College, Oxford. After retiring from Oxford, Dworkin became the Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, where he subsequently became the Bentham Professor of Jurisprudence—a position he does not hold anymore (he gave his valedictory lecture at UCL in March 2008). He is also currently Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and professor of Philosophy at New York University (NYU),^[4] where he has taught since the late 1970s. He currently co-teaches a colloquium in legal, political, and social philosophy with Thomas Nagel. Dworkin has regularly contributed, for several decades, to The New York Review of Books. He delivered the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lecture at Harvard, the Storrs Lectures at Yale, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford, and the Scribner Lectures at Princeton. In June 2011 it was announced that he would join the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.^[5]

Law as rule and principle[link]

Positivism's most significant critic rejects the theory on every conceivable level. He denies that there can be any general theory of the existence and content of law; he denies that local theories of particular legal systems can identify law without recourse to its merits, and he rejects the whole institutional focus of positivism. A theory of law is for Dworkin a theory of how cases ought to be decided and it begins, not with an account of political organization, but with an abstract ideal regulating the conditions under which governments may use coercive force over their subjects.^[6]

Dworkin is most famous for his critique of Hart's legal positivism; he sets forth the fullest statement of his critique in his book Law's Empire. Dworkin's theory is 'interpretive': the law is whatever follows from a constructive interpretation of the institutional history of the legal system.

Dworkin argues that moral principles that people hold dear are often wrong, even to the extent that certain crimes are acceptable if one's principles are skewed enough. To discover and apply these principles, courts interpret the legal data (legislation, cases etc.) with a view to articulating an interpretation that best explains and justifies past legal practice. All interpretation must follow, Dworkin argues, from the notion of "law as integrity" to make sense.

Out of the idea that law is 'interpretive' in this way, Dworkin argues that in every situation where people's legal rights are controversial, the best interpretation involves the right answer thesis. Dworkin opposes the notion that judges have a discretion in such difficult cases.

Dworkin's model of legal principles is also connected with Hart's notion of the Rule of Recognition. Dworkin rejects Hart's conception of a master rule in every legal system that identifies valid laws, on the basis that this would entail that the process of identifying law must be uncontroversial, whereas (Dworkin argues) people have legal rights even in cases where the correct legal outcome is open to reasonable dispute.

While Dworkin moves away from positivism's separation of law and morality, his concept suggests that the two are related in an epistemic rather than ontological sense as posited by traditional natural law.

The right answer thesis[link]

Suppose the legislature has passed a statute stipulating that 'sacrilegious contracts shall henceforth be invalid.' The community is divided as to whether a contract signed on Sunday is, for that reason alone, sacrilegious. It is known that very few of the legislators had that question in mind when they voted, and that they are now equally divided on the question of whether it should be so interpreted. Tom and Tim have signed a contract on Sunday, and Tom now sues Tim to enforce the terms of the contract, whose validity Tim contests. Shall we say that the judge must look for the right answer to the question of whether Tom's contract is valid, even though the community is deeply divided about what the right answer is? Or is it more realistic to say that there simply is no right answer to the question? (Dworkin, 1985, p. 119)

One of Dworkin's most interesting and controversial theses states that the law as properly interpreted will give an answer. This is not to say that everyone will have the same answer (a consensus of what is "right"), or if it did, the answer would not be justified exactly in the same way for every person; rather it means that there will be a necessary answer for each individual if he applies himself correctly to the legal question. For the correct method is that encapsulated by the metaphor of Hercules J. This metaphor of Judge Hercules, an ideal judge, immensely wise and with full knowledge of legal sources. Hercules (the name comes from a classical mythological hero) would also have plenty of time to decide. Acting on the premise that the law is a seamless web, Hercules is required to construct the theory that best fits and justifies the law as a whole (law as integrity) in order to decide any particular case. Hercules, Dworkin argues, would always come to the one right answer.

Dworkin does not deny that competent lawyers often disagree on what is the solution to a given case. On the contrary, he claims that they are disagreeing about the right answer to the case, the answer Hercules would give.

Dworkin's critics argue not only that law proper (that is, the legal sources in a positivist sense) is full of gaps and inconsistencies, but also that other legal standards (including principles) may be insufficient to solve a hard case. Some of them are incommensurable. In any of these situations, even Hercules would be in a dilemma and none of the possible answers would be the right one.

Discussion of the right answer thesis[link]

Dworkin defends his position saying that non-Herculean judges, much like everyday people, find their way and choose between options and values that were supposed to be incommensurable. Dworkin also argues that it is always possible to find out other rules or principles to solve the conflict between those we had in mind. The same counter-argument, however, regarding principles and moral standards that are incommensurable, would seem to apply to any further principles or rules we may discover in the process. In other words, the claim that there may always be more principles or rules to be taken into account proves nothing about the nature of those further principles, or about Dworkin's claim that the exercise, in the hands of the omnipotent Judge Hercules, will eventually come to a stop (when we have reached the right answer). In fact, the opposite conclusion could just as well be drawn from Dworkin's claim - that the exercise in question, under the guidance of such an omnipotent figure, would extend into infinity. Thus while a 'right' answer may be available at any given stage, no final right answer would ever be arrived at by Hercules. Or, there is nothing to suggest one way or the other.

Dworkin's metaphor of judge Hercules bears some resemblance to Rawls' veil of ignorance and Habermas' ideal speech situation, in that they all suggest idealized methods of arriving at somehow valid normative propositions. The key difference with respect to the former is that Rawls' veil of ignorance translates almost seamlessly from the purely ideal to the practical. In relation to politics in a democratic society, for example, it is a way of saying that those in power should treat the political opposition consistently with how they would like to be treated when in opposition, because their present position offers no guarantee as to what their position will be in the political landscape of the future (i.e. they will inevitably form the opposition at some point). Dworkin's Judge Hercules, on the other hand, is a purely idealized construct, that is if such a figure existed, he would arrive at a right answer in every moral dilemma. For a critique along these lines see Lorenzo Zucca's Constitutional Dilemmas.^[7]

Dworkin's right answer thesis turns on the success of his attack on the sceptical argument that right answers in legal-moral dilemmas cannot be determined. Dworkin's anti-sceptical argument is essentially that the properties of the sceptic's claim are analogous to those of substantive moral claims, that is, in asserting that the truth or falsity of 'legal-moral' dilemmas cannot be determined, the sceptic makes not a metaphysical claim about the way things are, but a moral claim to the effect that it is, in the face of epistemic uncertainty, unjust to determine legal-moral issues to the detriment of any given individual.

Theory of equality[link]

Dworkin has also made important contributions to what is sometimes called the equality of what debate. In a famous pair of articles and his book Sovereign Virtue he advocates a theory he calls 'equality of resources'. This theory combines two key ideas. Broadly speaking, the first is that human beings are responsible for the life choices they make. The second is that natural endowments of intelligence and talent are morally arbitrary and ought not to affect the distribution of resources in society. Like the rest of Dworkin's work, his theory of equality is underpinned by the core principle that every person is entitled to equal concern and respect in the design of the structure of society. Dworkin's theory of equality is one variety of so-called luck egalitarianism.

Positive and negative liberty[link]

This section may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (January 2011)

In the essay "Do Values Conflict? A Hedgehog's Approach" (Arizona Law Review, Vol 43:2), Dworkin contends that the values of liberty and equality do not necessarily conflict. He criticizes Isaiah Berlin's conception of liberty as "flat" and proposes a new, "dynamic" conception of liberty, suggesting that one cannot say that one's liberty is infringed when one is prevented from committing murder. Thus, liberty cannot be said to have been infringed when no wrong has been done. Put in this way, liberty is only liberty to do whatever we wish so long as we do not infringe upon the rights of others.

The negative conception of liberty (represented by Isaiah Berlin) is however not satisfactory to Dworkin since it merely concerns itself with political processes (e.g. laws forbidding murder, limiting car usage etc.). In Dworkin's view liberty must be understood as entailing certain considerations of equality, since it is not possible to exercise one's freedom without a considerable amount of resources (e.g. participating in the democratic process by voting is not possible without having the food, health, time or knowledge to do so). Liberty is therefore not only a question of process, but must also contain elements of substance.

One further criticism that can be leveled from the Berlinian enterprise is that the so-called "flat" conception of liberty does not entail the liberty to murder - rather, murder (when it does occur) is only a consequence of natural liberty. When one is prevented from murdering, one's liberty is not infringed merely because one is prevented from murdering, but because (more fundamentally) one is prevented from acting at all, by being restrained, handcuffed, put into prison, etc. The fact that one is thereby prevented from murdering is, again, merely a consequence of one's liberty being infringed. Thus Dworkin's argument can be recast as a deep-level consequentialist one.

Participant in public debate[link]

Dworkin is noted for his avid participation in public debates over law and issues of fundamental rights. He has been a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Awards[link]

In September 2007, it was announced that Dworkin was to be awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize. The prize, at approximately US$450,000, is awarded by the University of Bergen in Norway. The award citation of the Holberg Prize Academic Committee recognized that Dworkin has "elaborated a liberal egalitarian theory" and stressed Dworkin's effort to develop "an original and highly influential legal theory grounding law in morality, characterized by a unique ability to tie together abstract philosophical ideas and arguments with concrete everyday concerns in law, morals, and politics".^[8]

The New York University Annual Survey of American Law honored Dworkin with its 2006 dedication. Each spring dating back to 1942 the NYU Annual Survey of American Law dedicates one of its volumes to a preeminent figure in American law. Contemporaries Thomas Nagel, Richard Posner, and Jeremy Waldron all presented in honor of Dworkin.

In August 2011, the University of Buenos Aires awarded Dworkin an honorary doctorate. The resolution noted that he "has tirelessly defended the rule of law, democracy and human rights."

Bibliography[link]

Books by Ronald Dworkin[link]

• Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.
• The Philosophy of Law (Oxford Readings in Philosophy). Ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
• A Matter of Principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
• Law's Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
• Philosophical Issues in Senile Dementia. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987.
• A Bill of Rights for Britain. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990.
• Life's Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
• Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• A Badly Flawed Election: Debating Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court, and American Democracy. Ed. New York: New Press, 2002.
• From Liberal Values to Democratic Transition: Essays in Honor of Janos Kis. Ed. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004.
• Justice in Robes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
• Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
• The Supreme Court Phalanx: The Court's New Right-Wing Bloc. New York: New York Review Books, 2008.
• Justice for Hedgehogs. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Secondary literature on Dworkin[link]

• Allard, Julie. Dworkin et Kant: Réflexions sur le judgement. Bruxelles: Editions de l'ULB, 2001.
• Brown, Alexander. Ronald Dworkin's Theory of Equality: Domestic and Global Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
• Burke, John J.A. The Political Foundation of Law: The Need for Theory with Practical Value. San Francisco: Austin & Winfield, 1992.
• Burley, Justine, ed. Dworkin and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.
• Cohen, Marshall, ed. Ronald Dworkin and Contemporary Jurisprudence. London: Duckworth, 1984.
• Gaffney, Paul. Ronald Dworkin on Law as Integrity: Rights as Principles of Adjudication. Lewiston, New York: Mellen University Press, 1996.
• Guest, Stephen. Ronald Dworkin (Jurists: Profiles in Legal Theory). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.
• Hershovitz, Scott, ed. Exploring Law's Empire: The Jurisprudence of Ronald Dworkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Hunt, Alan, ed. Reading Dworkin Critically. New York: Berg, 1992.
• Ripstein, Arthur, ed. Ronald Dworkin (Contemporary Philosophers in Focus). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Wesche, Stefen and Zanetti, Véronique, eds. Dworkin: Un débat. Paris: Ousia, 2000.

See also[link]

• American philosophy
• Contributions to liberal theory
• Egalitarianism
• Legal indeterminacy
• Judicial activism
• Legal formalism
• Legal positivism
• List of American philosophers
• Equality

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ronald Dworkin

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ronald Dworkin

• NYU Law Faculty profile
• UCL Faculty of Laws profile
• New York Review of Books archive
• "Ronald Dworkin - Mr Justice", The Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 2007
• "Interpretation and Coherence in Legal Reasoning" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• "Interpretivist Theories of Law" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Charles Blattberg's critique of Dworkin and John Rawls for failing to take politics seriously enough.
• Ronald Dworkin at the Internet Movie Database

Learned Hand
Judge of United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
In office 1924–1961
Nominated by	Calvin Coolidge
Preceded by	Julius Marshuetz Mayer
Succeeded by	Harold Raymond Medina
Judge of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
In office 1909–1924
Nominated by	William Howard Taft
Preceded by	(none, new seat)
Succeeded by	Thomas D. Thacher
Personal details
Born	(1872-01-27)January 27, 1872 Albany, New York
Died	August 18, 1961(1961-08-18) (aged 89) New York City
Spouse(s)	Frances Amelia Fincke Hand
Children	Mary Deshon, Frances, and Constance
Religion	Protestant as a youth, Agnostic as an adult

Billings Learned Hand ( /ˈlɜrnɨd/ LURN-id; January 27, 1872 – August 18, 1961) was a United States judge and judicial philosopher. He served on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and later the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Hand has been quoted more often than any other lower-court judge by legal scholars and by the Supreme Court of the United States.^[1]

Born and raised in Albany, New York, Hand majored in philosophy at Harvard College and graduated with honors from Harvard Law School. After a short career as a lawyer in Albany and New York City, he was appointed as a Federal District Judge in Manhattan in 1909 at the age of 37. The profession suited his detached and open-minded temperament, and his decisions soon won him a reputation for craftsmanship and authority. Between 1909 and 1914, under the influence of Herbert Croly's social theories, Hand supported New Nationalism. He ran unsuccessfully as the Progressive Party's candidate for Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals in 1913, but withdrew from active politics shortly afterwards. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge promoted Hand to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which he went on to lead as the Senior Circuit Judge (later retitled Chief Judge) from 1939 until his semi-retirement in 1951. Scholars have recognized the Second Circuit under Hand as one of the finest appeals courts in the country's history. Friends and admirers often lobbied for Hand's promotion to the Supreme Court, but circumstances and his political past conspired against his appointment.

Hand possessed a gift for the English language, and his writings are admired as legal literature.^[2] He rose to fame outside the legal profession in 1944 after giving a short address in Central Park that struck a popular chord in its appeal for tolerance. During a period when a hysterical fear of subversion divided the nation, Hand was viewed as a liberal defender of civil liberties. A collection of Hand's papers and addresses, published in 1952 as The Spirit of Liberty, sold well and won him new admirers. Even after he criticized the civil-rights activism of the 1950s Warren Court, Hand retained his popularity.

Hand is also remembered as a pioneer of modern approaches to statutory interpretation. His decisions in specialist fields, such as patents, torts, admiralty law, and antitrust law, set lasting standards for craftsmanship and clarity. On constitutional matters, he was both a political progressive and an advocate of judicial restraint. He believed in the protection of free speech and in bold legislation to address social and economic problems. He argued, however, that the United States Constitution does not empower courts to overrule the legislation of elected bodies, except in extreme circumstances. Instead, he advocated the "combination of toleration and imagination that to me is the epitome of all good government".^[3]

Early life[link]

Samuel Hand, Learned's father, was a successful lawyer who died at age 52.

Billings Learned Hand was born on January 27, 1872, in Albany, New York, the second and last child of Samuel and Lydia Hand (née Learned). His mother's family traditionally used surnames as given names, and Hand was named for an uncle and a grandfather, both named Billings Peck Learned.^[4] The Hands were a prominent family with a tradition of activism in the Democratic Party. Hand grew up in comfortable circumstances on Albany's main residential street. The family had an "almost hereditary" attachment to the legal profession,^[5] and has been described as "the most distinguished legal family in northern New York".^[6]

Samuel Hand was an appellate lawyer,^[7] who had risen rapidly through the ranks of an Albany-based law firm in the 1860s and by age 32 was the firm's leading lawyer. He became the leader of the appellate bar and argued cases before the New York Court of Appeals, in 1878, he became the leader of the appellate bar and argued cases before the Court of Appeals in "greater number and importance than those argued by any other lawyer in New York during the same period".^[8] Samuel Hand was also a distant, intimidating figure, and Learned Hand later described his relations with his father as "not really intimate".^[9] Samuel Hand died from cancer when Hand was 14.^[10] Learned Hand's mother thereafter promoted an idealized memory of her husband's professional success, intellectual abilities, and parental perfection, placing considerable pressure on her son.^[11]

Lydia Hand was an involved and protective mother, who had been influenced by a Calvinist aunt as a child; and she passed on a strong sense of duty and guilt to her only son.^[12] Learned Hand eventually came to understand the influences of his parents as formative.^[13] After his father's death, he looked to religion to help him cope, writing to his cousin Augustus Noble Hand: "If you could imagine one half the comfort my religion has given to me in this terrible loss, you would see that Christ never forsakes those who cling to him." The depth of Hand's early religious convictions was in sharp contrast to his later agnosticism.^[14]

Hand was beset by anxieties and self-doubt throughout his life, including night terrors as a child. He later admitted he was "very undecided, always have been—a very insecure person, very fearful; morbidly fearful".^[15] Especially after his father's death, he grew up surrounded by doting women—his mother, his aunt, and his sister Lydia (Lily), eight years his elder.^[16] Hand struggled with his name during his childhood and adulthood, worried that "Billings" and "Learned" were not sufficiently masculine. While working as a lawyer in 1899, he ceased using the name "Billings"—calling it "pompous"—and ultimately took on the nickname "B".^[7][17]

The Albany Academy, Albany, New York

Hand spent two years at a small primary school before transferring at the age of seven to The Albany Academy, which he attended for the next 10 years. He never enjoyed the Academy's uninspired teaching or its narrow curriculum, which focused on Ancient Greek and Latin, with few courses in English, history, science, or modern languages. Socially, he considered himself an outsider, rarely enjoying recesses or the school's military drills.^[18] Vacations, spent in Elizabethtown, New York, were happier times. There, Hand developed a life-long friendship with his cousin and future colleague Augustus Noble Hand, two years his senior.^[19] The two were self-confessed "wild boys", camping and hiking in the woods and hills, where Hand developed a love of nature and the countryside.^[20] Many years later, when he was in his 70s, Hand recorded several songs for the Library of Congress that he had learned as a boy from Civil War veterans in Elizabethtown.^[21] After his father's death, he felt an increased pressure from his mother to excel academically. He finished near the top of his class and was accepted into Harvard College, which his classmates—who opted for places such as Williams and Yale—thought a "stuckup, snobbish school".^[22]

Harvard[link]

Learned Hand in 1893, the year he graduated from Harvard College

Hand started at Harvard College in 1889, initially focusing on classical studies and mathematics as advised by his late father. At the end of his sophomore year, however, he changed direction. He embarked on courses in philosophy and economics, studying under the eminent and inspirational philosophers William James, Josiah Royce and George Santayana.^[23]

At first, Hand found Harvard a difficult social environment. He was not selected for any of the social clubs that dominated campus life, and he felt this exclusion keenly. He was equally unsuccessful with the Glee Club and the football team, although he rowed for a time as a substitute for the rowing club. He later described himself as a "serious boy", a hard worker who did not smoke, drink, or consort with prostitutes.^[24] He mixed more in his sophomore and senior years. He became a member of the Hasty Pudding Club and appeared as a blond-wigged chorus girl in the 1892 student musical. He was also elected president of The Harvard Advocate, a student literary magazine.^[25]

Learned Hand (front row, second from right) with fellow students outside Austin Hall at Harvard Law School, between 1894 and 1896

Hand's studious ways resulted in his election to Phi Beta Kappa, an elite society of scholarly students.^[26] He graduated with highest honors, was awarded a master's as well as a bachelor's degree,^[27] and was chosen by his classmates to deliver the Class Day oration at the 1893 commencement.^[26] Family tradition and expectation suggested that he would study law after graduation. For a while, however, he seriously considered post-graduate work in philosophy, but he received no encouragement from his family or philosophy professors. Doubting himself, he then, as he put it, "drifted" towards law.^[28]

Hand's three years at Harvard Law School were intellectually and socially stimulating. In his second year, he moved into a boarding house with a group of fellow law students who were to become close friends. They studied hard and enjoyed discussing philosophy and literature and telling bawdy tales. Hand's intellectual reputation proved less of a hindrance at law school than it had as an undergraduate. He was elected to the Pow-Wow Club, in which law students practiced their skills in moot courts. He was also chosen as an editor of the Harvard Law Review, although he resigned in 1894 because it took too much time from his studies.^[29]

During the 1890s, Harvard Law School was pioneering the casebook method of teaching introduced by Dean Christopher Langdell.^[30][31] Apart from Langdell, Hand's professors included Samuel Williston, John Chipman Gray, and James Barr Ames. Hand preferred those teachers who valued common sense and fairness and ventured beyond casebook study into the philosophy of law.^[32] His favorite professor was James Bradley Thayer, who taught him evidence in his second year and constitutional law in his third. A man of broad interests, Thayer became a major influence on Hand's jurisprudence. He emphasized the law's historical and human dimensions rather than its certainties and extremes. He stressed the need for courts to exercise judicial restraint in deciding social issues.^[33]

Albany legal practice[link]

Hand graduated from Harvard Law School in 1896 at the age of 24. He then returned to Albany to live with his mother and aunt, and started work for the law firm in which an uncle, Matthew Hale, was a partner. Hale's unexpected death a few months later obliged Hand to move to a new firm, where by 1899 he had become a partner.^[34] He had difficulty attracting his own clients, however, and found the work trivial and dull.^[35] Much of his time was spent researching and writing briefs, with few opportunities for the appellate work he preferred. His early courtroom appearances, when they came, were frequently difficult, sapping his fragile self-confidence. He began to fear that he lacked the ability to think on his feet in court.^[36]

For two years, Hand tried to succeed as a lawyer by force of will, giving all his time to the practice. By 1900, he was deeply dissatisfied with his progress. For intellectual stimulation, he increasingly looked outside his daily work. He wrote scholarly articles, taught part-time at Albany Law School, and joined a lawyers' discussion group in New York City. He also developed an interest in politics.^[37] Hand came from a line of loyal Democrats, but in 1898 he voted for Republican Theodore Roosevelt as governor of New York. Though he deplored Roosevelt's role in the "militant imperialism" of the Spanish–American War, he approved of the "amorphous mixture of socialism and laisser faire [sic]" in Roosevelt's campaign speeches.^[38] Hand caused further family controversy by registering as a Republican for the presidential election of 1900.^[39] Life and work in Albany no longer fulfilled him; he began applying for jobs in New York City, despite family pressure not to move.^[40]

Marriage and New York[link]

After reaching the age of 30 without developing a serious interest in a woman, Hand considered himself destined for bachelorhood. However, during a 1901 summer holiday in the Québec resort of La Malbaie, he met 25-year-old Frances Fincke, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College.^[41] Though indecisive in most matters, he waited only a few weeks before proposing. The more cautious Fincke postponed her answer for almost a year, while Hand wrote to and occasionally saw her. He also began to look more seriously for work in New York City.^[42] The next summer, both Hand and Fincke returned to La Malbaie, and at the end of August 1902, they became engaged and kissed for the first time.^[43] They married on December 6, 1902, shortly after Hand had accepted a post with the Manhattan law firm of Zabriskie, Burrill & Murray.^[44] The couple had three daughters, Mary Deshon (born 1905), Frances (born 1907), and Constance (born 1909). Hand proved an anxious husband and father. He corresponded regularly with his doctor brother-in-law about initial difficulties in conceiving and about his children's illnesses. He himself survived pneumonia in February 1905, taking months to recover.^[45]

In 1914, Hand moved his chambers across Broadway from the dilapidated Post-Office–Court Building (left) into the recently completed Woolworth Building (center), then the tallest in the world.

The family at first spent summers in Mount Kisco, with Hand commuting at the weekends. After 1910, they rented summer homes in Cornish, New Hampshire, a writers' and artists' colony with a stimulating social scene. The Hands bought a house there in 1919, which they called "Low Court".^[46] Cornish was a nine-hour train journey from New York, and the couple were separated for long periods, with Hand able to join the family only for vacations.^[47] The Hands became friends with the noted artist Maxfield Parrish, who lived in nearby Plainfield, and the Misses Hand posed for some of his famous paintings.^[48] The Hands also became close friends with Cornish resident Louis Dow, a Dartmouth College professor. Frances Hand spent increasing amounts of time with Dow while her husband was in New York, and tension crept into the marriage. Despite speculation, however, there is no evidence that she and Dow were lovers. Hand regretted Frances' long absences and urged her to spend more time with him, but he maintained an enduring friendship with Dow.^[49] He blamed himself for a lack of insight into his wife's needs in the early years of the marriage, confessing his "blindness and insensibility to what you wanted and to your right to your own ways when they differed from mine". Fearing he might otherwise lose her altogether, Hand came to accept Frances' desire to spend time in the country with another man.^[50]

While staying in Cornish in 1908, Hand began a close friendship with the political commentator and philosopher Herbert Croly.^[51] At the time, Croly was writing his influential book The Promise of American Life, in which he advocated a program of democratic and egalitarian reform under a national government with increased powers.^[52] When the book was published in November 1909, Hand sent copies to friends and acquaintances, including former president Theodore Roosevelt.^[53] Croly's ideas had a powerful effect on Roosevelt's politics, influencing his advocacy of New Nationalism and the development of Progressivism.^[54]

Hand remained disappointed in his progress at work. A move to the firm of Gould & Wilkie in January 1904 brought neither the challenges nor the financial rewards for which he had hoped.^[55] "I was never any good as a lawyer," he later admitted. "I didn't have any success, any at all."^[56] In 1907, deciding that at the age of 35 success as a Wall Street lawyer was out of reach, he lobbied for a potential new federal judgeship in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the federal court headquartered in Manhattan, and involved himself briefly in local Republican politics to strengthen his political base. In the event, Congress did not create the new judgeship in 1907, but when the post was finally created in 1909, Hand renewed his candidacy. With the help of the influential Charles C. Burlingham, a senior New York lawyer and close friend, he gained the backing of Attorney General George W. Wickersham, who urged President William Howard Taft to appoint Hand. One of the youngest federal judges ever appointed, Hand took his judicial oath in April 1909.^[57]

Federal judge[link]

Hand's federal district judge nomination

Hand served as a federal judge in the Southern District of New York from 1909 to 1924. He dealt with fields of common law, including torts, contracts, and copyright, and admiralty law. His initial unfamiliarity with some of these specialties, along with his limited courtroom experience, caused him anxiety at first.^[58] Most of Hand's early cases concerned bankruptcy issues, which he found tiresome, and patent law, which fascinated him.^[59]

Learned Hand sat on the federal trial court in Manhattan for fifteen years.

Hand also made some important decisions in the area of free speech. A frequently cited 1913 decision was United States v. Kennerley,^[60] an obscenity case concerning Daniel Carson Goodman's Hagar Revelly, a social-hygiene novel about the "wiles of vice" that had caught the attention of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.^[61] Hand allowed the case to go forward on the basis of the Hicklin test, which stemmed back to a seminal English decision of 1868, Regina v. Hicklin.^[62] In his opinion, Hand recommended updating the law, arguing that the obscenity rule should not simply protect the most susceptible readers but should reflect community standards:

It seems hardly likely that we are even to-day so lukewarm in our interest in letters or serious discussion as to be content to reduce our treatment of sex to the standard of a child's library in the supposed interest of a salacious few, or that shame will for long prevent us from adequate portrayal of some of the most serious and beautiful sides of human nature.^[63]

Following his appointment as a judge, Hand became politically active in the cause of New Nationalism.^[64] With reservations, he supported Theodore Roosevelt's return to national politics in 1911. He approved of the former president's plans to legislate on behalf of the underprivileged and to control corporations, as well as of his campaign against the abuse of judicial power.^[65] Hand sought to influence Roosevelt's views on these subjects, both in person and in print, and wrote articles for Roosevelt's magazine The Outlook.^[66] His hopes of swaying Roosevelt were nonetheless often dashed. Roosevelt's poor grasp of legal issues particularly exasperated Hand.^[67]

Despite overwhelming support for Roosevelt in the primaries and polls, the Republicans renominated the incumbent President Taft. A furious Roosevelt bolted from the party to form the Progressive Party, nicknamed the "Bull Moose" movement. Most Republican progressives followed suit, including Hand.^[68] The splitting of the Republican vote, however, harmed both Roosevelt's and Taft's chances of winning the November 1912 presidential election. As Hand expected, Roosevelt lost to the Democratic Party's Woodrow Wilson, though he polled more votes than Taft.^[69]

Hand took the defeat in his stride. He saw the election merely as a first step in a reform campaign for "real national democracy".^[70] Though he had limited his public involvement in the election campaign, he now took part in planning a party structure.^[71] He also accepted the Progressive nomination for chief judge of New York Court of Appeals, then an elective position, in September 1913.^[72] He refused to campaign, however, and later admitted that "the thought of harassing the electorate was more than I could bear".^[73] His vow of silence affected his showing, and he received only 13% of the votes.^[74] Hand came to regret his candidacy: "I ought to have lain off, as I now view it; I was a judge and a judge has no business to mess into such things."^[75]

By 1916, Hand realized that the Progressive Party had no future, as the liberal policies of the Democratic government were making much of its program redundant. Roosevelt's decision not to stand in the 1916 presidential election dealt the party its death blow.^[76] Hand had already turned to an alternative political outlet in Herbert Croly's The New Republic, a liberal magazine he had helped launch in 1914.^[77] He wrote a series of unsigned articles for the magazine on issues of social reform and judicial power; his only signed article was "The Hope of the Minimum Wage", published in November 1916, which called for laws to protect the underprivileged. Hand often attended staff dinners and meetings and became a close friend of the gifted young editor Walter Lippmann.^[78] The outbreak of World War I had coincided with the founding of the magazine, whose pages often debated the events in Europe. The New Republic adopted a cautiously sympathetic stance towards the Allies which Hand supported wholeheartedly. After the United States entered the war in 1917, Hand considered leaving the bench to assist the war effort. Several possible war-related positions presented themselves. However, nothing came of them, aside from the chairing of a committee on intellectual property law that suggested treaty amendments for the Paris Peace Conference.^[79]

"Conscription", a drawing by Henry J. Glintenkamp published in The Masses in 1917 and deemed by the postmaster of New York City "to arouse discontent and disaffection"^[80]

Hand made his most memorable decision of the war in 1917 in Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten.^[81] After the country joined the war, Congress had enacted an Espionage Act that made it a federal crime to hinder the war effort. The first test of the new law came two weeks later when the postmaster of New York City refused to deliver the August issue of The Masses, a self-described "revolutionary journal". The edition contained drawings, cartoons, and articles criticizing the government's decision to go to war.^[82]

The publishing company sought an injunction to prevent the ban, and the case came before Judge Hand.^[83] In July 1917, he ruled that the journal should not be barred from distribution through the mail. Though The Masses supported those who refused to serve in the forces, its text did not, in Hand's view, tell readers that they must violate the law. Hand argued that suspect material should be judged on what he called an "incitement test": only if its language directly urged readers to violate the law was it seditious—otherwise freedom of speech should be protected.^[84] This focus on the words themselves, rather than on their effect, was novel and daring; but Hand's decision was promptly stayed, and later overturned on appeal.^[85] He always maintained that his ruling had been correct. Between 1918 and 1919, he attempted to convince Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a man he greatly admired, of his argument. His efforts at first appeared fruitless, but Holmes' dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States in November 1919 urged greater protection of political speech.^[86] Scholars have credited the critiques of Hand, Ernst Freund, Louis Brandeis, and Zechariah Chafee for the change in Holmes's views.^[87] In the long-term, Hand's decision proved a landmark in the history of free speech in the country.^[88] In the late 1960s, the Supreme Court announced a standard for protecting free speech that in effect recognized his Masses opinion as law.^[89]

"Physically Fit", a drawing by Henry J. Glintenkamp published in The Masses in 1917 and introduced as supplemental evidence during the trial

Hand had known that ruling against the government might harm his prospects of promotion.^[90] By the time of the case, he was already the most senior judge of his district. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit often summoned him to sit with that court to hear appeals, a task he found stimulating. In 1917, he lobbied for promotion to the Second Circuit, but the unpopularity of his Masses decision and his reputation as a liberal stood against him. He was passed over in favor of Martin T. Manton.^[91]

In the final months of the war, Hand increasingly supported President Woodrow Wilson's post-war foreign policy objectives. He believed the United States should endorse the League of Nations and the Treaty of Versailles, despite their flaws. This position estranged him from Croly and others at The New Republic, who vehemently rejected both. Alienated from his old circle on the magazine and by the reactionary and isolationist mood of the country, Hand found himself politically homeless.^[92]

Between the wars[link]

The next Second Circuit vacancy arose in 1921, but with the conservative Warren G. Harding administration in power, Hand did not put himself forward. Hand's reputation was such that by 1923, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wanted him on the Supreme Court,^[93] and in 1924 Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, appointed Hand to the Second Circuit. It was a sign of Hand's increased stature that figures such as Coolidge and Chief Justice William Howard Taft now endorsed him. Coolidge sought to add new blood to a senior judiciary that was seen as corrupt and inefficient.^[94] In 1926 and 1927, the Second Circuit was strengthened by the appointments of Thomas Walter Swan and Hand's cousin Augustus Noble Hand.^[95]

After the demise of the Progressive Party, Hand had withdrawn from party politics.^[30] He committed himself to public impartiality, despite his strong views on political issues. He remained, however, a strong supporter of freedom of speech, and any sign of the "merry sport of Red-baiting" troubled him. In 1920, for example, he wrote in support of New York Governor Al Smith's veto of the anti-sedition Lusk Bills. The New York Assembly had approved these bills in a move to bar five elected Socialist Party legislators from taking their seats.^[96] In 1922, Hand privately objected to a proposed limit on the number of Jewish students admitted to Harvard College. "If we are to have in this country racial divisions like those in Europe," he wrote, "let us close up shop now".^[97]

In public, Hand discussed issues of democracy, free speech, and toleration only in general terms. This discretion, plus a series of impressive speaking engagements, won him the respect of legal scholars and journalists,^[98] and by 1930 he was viewed as a serious candidate for a seat on the Supreme Court. His friend Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard Law School professor, was among those lobbying hard for Hand's appointment. President Herbert Hoover chose to bypass him, possibly for political reasons, and appointed Charles Evans Hughes, who had previously served on the Court for six years before resigning to become the Republican candidate for President in 1916, as Chief Justice. With Hughes and another New Yorker, Harlan Fiske Stone, on the Court, the promotion of a third New Yorker was then seen as impossible.^[99]

Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933

Hand had voted for Hoover in 1928, and he did so again in 1932; but in 1936, he voted for the Democrats and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as a reaction to the economic and social turmoil that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929. With the Great Depression setting in, Hand favored a policy of interventionist central government. He came to accept Frankfurter's view that redistribution of wealth was essential for economic recovery. Hoover resisted this approach, favoring individualism and free enterprise. Roosevelt, on the other hand, promised the voters a New Deal. They elected him on a platform of strong executive leadership and radical economic reform. Hand voted for Roosevelt again in 1940 and 1944, but he remained vigilant on the constitutional dangers of big government.^[100] Like others, including Walter Lippmann, he sensed the dictatorial potential of New Deal policies. He had no hesitation in condemning Roosevelt's 1937 bill to expand the Supreme Court and pack it with New Dealers.^[101]

Hand was increasingly called upon to judge cases arising from the flood of New Deal legislation. The line between central government authority and local legislation particularly tested his powers of judgment. In 1935, the case of United States v. Schechter came before the Second Circuit.^[102] Hand and his two colleagues had to judge whether a New York poultry firm had contravened New Deal legislation on unfair trade practices. They ruled that the National Industrial Recovery Act did not apply to the Schechter Poultry Corporation, which traded solely within the state. "The line is no doubt in the end arbitrary," Hand wrote in a memorandum, "but we have got to draw it, because without it Congress can take over all the government."^[103] The Supreme Court later affirmed Hand's decision.

Hand became an acknowledged expert on New Deal statutes. He relished the challenge of interpreting such legislation, calling it "an act of creative imagination".^[104] In a 1933 broadcast, he explained the balancing act required of a judge in interpreting statutes:

On the one hand he must not enforce whatever he thinks best; he must leave that to the common will expressed by the government. On the other, he must try as best he can to put into concrete form what that will is, not by slavishly following the words, but by trying honestly to say what was the underlying purpose expressed.^[105]

World War II[link]

When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Learned Hand adopted an anti-isolationist stance. He rarely spoke out publicly, not only because of his position but because he thought bellicosity unseemly in an old man.^[106] In February 1939, he became his court's senior circuit leader (in effect, chief judge, although the title was not created until 1948). In this post, Hand succeeded Martin Manton, who had resigned after corruption allegations that later led to Manton's criminal conviction for bribery.^[107] Not an admirer of Manton, Hand nonetheless testified at his trial that he had never noticed any corrupt behavior in his predecessor. Having sat in two cases in which Manton accepted bribes, Hand worried for years afterward that he should have detected his colleague's corruption.^[108]

Hand still regarded his main job as judging. As circuit leader, he sought to free himself and his judges from too great an administrative burden. He concentrated on maintaining good relations with his fellow judges and on cleansing the court of patronage appointments. Despite the Manton case and constant friction between two of the court's judges, Charles Edward Clark and Jerome Frank, the Second Circuit under Hand earned a reputation as one of the best appeal courts in the country's history.^[109]

In 1942, Hand's friends once again lobbied for him to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, but Roosevelt did not appoint him. The president gave age as the reason, but philosophical differences with Hand may also have played a part.^[110] In the end, Wiley Rutledge, who took the seat, died in 1949, while Hand lived until 1961.^[111] Deeply disappointed at the time, Hand later regretted his ambition: "It was the importance, the power, the trappings of the God damn thing that really drew me on."^[112]