Learned Hand

At 89 years old, Learned Hand physical status not available right now. We will update Learned Hand's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Billings Learned Hand (January 27, 1872 – August 18, 1961) was an American judge and judicial philosopher.

He served on the Southern District Court of New York's Southern District Court and later the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Hands have been quoted more often by legal scholars and the Supreme Court of the United States than by any other lower-court judge. Hands was born in Albany, New York, and graduated with honors from Harvard Law School.

He began practicing as a lawyer in Albany and New York City and was appointed as a federal district judge in Manhattan at the age of 37.

The profession suited his unstructured and open-minded temperament, and his decisions earned him a reputation for craftsmanship and leadership shortly after.

Hand supported New Nationalism between 1909 and 1914, under the influence of Herbert Croly's sociological theories.

Early life

Billings Learned Hand was born in Albany, New York, in the second and last child of Samuel Hand (1833–1886) and Lydia Hand (née Learned). His mother's family used surnames instead of given names; and Hand was named for a maternal uncle and a grandfather; both Billings Peck Learned. The Hands were a prominent family with a tradition of activism in the Democratic Party. Hands were raised in familiar circumstances. The family had a "most hereditary" connection to the legal profession and has been described as "the most distinguished legal family in northern New York."

Samuel Hand, an appellate advocate who had risen quickly through the ranks of an Albany-based law firm in the 1860s and, by age 32, was the firm's top prosecutor. He became the leader of the appellate bar in 1878 and argued cases before the New York Court of Appeals in "greater number and importance than those argued by any other lawyer in New York during the same time." Samuel Hand was a distant, threatening figure to his son; Learned Hand later described the relationship with his father as "not really personal." When Learned was 14 years old, Samuel Hand died of cancer. Learned's mother published an idealized memory of her husband's academic accomplishment, intellectual abilities, and parental perfection, putting the strain on her son.

Lydia Hand was a proactive and protective mother who had been inspired by a Calvinist aunt as a child; she died with a strong sense of obligation and responsibility for her only son. Learned Hand began to recognize his parents' influences as formative. "If you could imagine one half the love my religion has given to me in the wake of his father's death," he wrote to his cousin Augustus Noble Hand: "You would never forsake those who cling to him." Hand's early religious convictions were in sharp contrast to his later apprehensions.

As a child, the hand was tense from fears and self-doubt through his life, including night terrors. He later admitted that he was "very undecided, always have been—a very insecure individual, extremely afraid, and morbidly afraid." Especially after his father's death, he grew up surrounded by doting women: his mother, aunt, and sister Lydia (Lily), eight years older. Throughout his childhood and adulthood, the hand wrestled with his name, afraid that "Billings" and "Learned" were not appropriate masculine. He stopped using the word "Billings"—calling it "pompous"—and eventually adopted the word "B" when working as a lawyer in 1899, and eventually adopted the term "B" instead.

Hand spent two years at a small primary school before transferring to The Albany Academy at the age of seven, which he attended for the next ten years. He never liked the Academy's uninspired teaching or its narrow curriculum, which concentrated on Ancient Greek and Latin, but there were no English, history, mathematics, or modern languages on offer. He viewed himself as an outsider, seldom enjoying recesses or the school's military drills. Holidays in Elizabethtown, New York, were better times than ever. Hand continued his friendship with his cousin and future colleague, Augustus Noble Hand, who was 22 years old, as a student at the University of Iowa. The two boys were self-confessed "wild boys" who went camping and hiking in the woods and hills, where Hand developed a love of nature and the countryside. Hand wrote several songs for the Library of Congress that he had learned as a child from Civil War veterans in Elizabethtown many years ago. He felt more pressure from his mother to excel academically after his father's death. He was ranked near the top of his class and was accepted into Harvard College. His classmates, who opted for Williams and Yale, called it a "stuckup, snobbish school."

Source