Learned Hand: Likeness

“The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country whether we like it or not, we must learn to accept it.”

Learned Hand

"Proceedings in Memory of Justice Brandeis" (1942).
Extra-judicial writings
Context: The day has clearly gone forever of societies small enough for their members to have personal acquaintance with one another, and to find their station through the appraisal of those who have first hand knowledge of them. Publicity is an evil substitute and the art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, every year adds to its potency and to the finality of its judgments. The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen and the far-spread magazine, rules the country whether we like it or not, we must learn to accept it.

Learning , Country

“A wise man once said, "Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through."”

Learned Hand

"The Preservation of Personality" commencement address at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania (2 June 1927); also in The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses (1952), p. 32.
Extra-judicial writings

Strong

“Yet the whole structure of the common law is an obvious denial of this theory; it stands as a monument slowly raised, like a coral reef, from the minute accretions of past individuals, of whom each built upon the relics which his predecessors left, and in his turn left a foundation upon which his successors might work.”

Learned Hand

Book Review, 35 Harv. L. Rev. 479, 479 (1922) (reviewing Benjamin N. Cardozo's The Nature of the Judicial Process).
Extra-judicial writings

Law , Past

“"I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken." I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every courthouse, and, may I say, of every legislative body in the United States. I should like to have every court begin, "I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that we may be mistaken."”

Learned Hand

Morals in Public Life (1951); Hand is here paraphrasing a famous expression of Oliver Cromwell from his letter of 3 August 1650 to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland.
Extra-judicial writings

School , Thinking , Christ

“Like John Stuart Mill, he would often begin by stating the other side better than its advocate had stated it himself.”

Learned Hand

On Benjamin N. Cardozo in "Mr. Justice Cardozo" (1939); also in The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses (1952), p. 131.
Extra-judicial writings

“We like rather to dream of a body of young men as a live thing, as a tree where all the branches are nourished by a single sap, and where each part is meaningless and incomplete except in connection with its fellows. You may lop away the dead branches, you may bend the trunk, you may dig about it and water it; but leave it to assume its own form, do not constrain the peculiar roots, or you will have a crippled, gnarled monster, and no tree.”

Learned Hand

"Class-Day Oration" (1893).
Extra-judicial writings

Men , Dreams , Tree , Water