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

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

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

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

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

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