Reason and Imagination: The Selected Correspondence of Learned Hand provides readers with an intimate look into the life and mind of Judge Learned Hand, an icon in American Law. This new book brings to light previously unpublished letters and gives readers insight into Hand's thoughts on American jurisprudence and policy. This new collection includes a preface by Ronald Dworkin.

Originally published in 1970. This is a study of one of the most highly respected tribunals in the history of the English-speaking world—the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Situated in Manhattan, the Second Circuit Court, serving New York, Connecticut, and Vermont, is the most important commercial court in the country. But, like other inferior courts, it has never been studied in depth. Marvin Schick provides a comprehensive analysis. From 1941 to 1951, Learned Hand presided over the Second Circuit as chief judge, and the court bore his stamp. But on its bench sat other men of great competence, judges Thomas W. Swan, August N. Hand, and Harrie B. Chase, as well as Charles E. Clark and Jerome N. Frank, whose constant disagreement characterized much of the court's work. Schick studies the Second Circuit Court from several angles: historical, biographical, behavioral, and case analytical. He tells a history of the court from its origins in 1789. He provides biographical sketches of the six judges who sat during Learned Hand's tenure as chief judge. He analyzes the many decisions handed down by the court, including the precedent setters. He examines the court's decision-making process, especially its unique procedures such as the memorandum system, which requires from the judges "preliminary opinions" in the cases they hear. A novel feature of this book is the correlation of votes of the Second Circuit judges with subsequent decisions of the Supreme Court. Schick was aided in his study by having access to the private papers of Judge Clark. These thousands of memoranda and letters throw much light on the workings of the Second Circuit Court and reveal the bargaining that went on among the judges in difficult cases. The Clark papers make possible a clearer understanding of the incessant conflict between Clark and Frank and show how this unusual relationship gave vitality to the Second Circuit.

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.

A Masterful, moving account of the life and work of one of the great judges of the twentieth century, whose work has left a profound mark on our legal, intellectual, and social landscape. The greatest judge never to be appointed to the Supreme Court, Learned Hand is widely considered the peer of Justices Holmes, Brandeis, and Cardozo. In his more than fifty years on the bench, he left an unequaled legacy of lastingly influential writings. This distinctive biography goes well beyond Hand's official work, however, to depict both a complex human being and the times in which he lived. The first to draw on the enormous collection of the judge's private papers, the eminent constitutional scholar Gerald Gunther vividly portrays a public man consumed by private doubts. Gunther's lively account moves from Hand's childhood in a formidable (and anxiety-producing) family of lawyers to his years at Harvard as a studious outsider, his frustrating experience in private law practice, his felt inadequacies in marriage, and his work as a federal judge. Throughout his life, Hand believed himself unworthy of the accolades bestowed upon him; self-doubt permeated all aspects of his life. Gunther subtly explores the ties between the modest, uncertain man -- a liberal skeptic who was never "too sure [he was] right" -- and his public record, and suggests that Hand's personal traits shaped his modest approach to judging: the questioning human being could not help acting that way as a judge. Hand's most enduring legacy is his advocacy of judicial restraint: repeatedly he sounded the dangers of excessive activism in unelected judges. Yet he mustered the courage to support such basic values as freedom ofexpression -- from his personally costly defense of dissenters amid the hysteria of World War I to his strong affirmation of free speech in his rulings on obscenity and his outspoken attacks on McCarthyism in the 1950s. This biography also offers the perspective of one of this era's most sensitive public figures on the rich political and social history of the first six decades of the twentieth century. By examining Hand's voluminous correspondence with such acquaintances as Walter Lippmann, Felix Frankfurter, and Herbert Croly (with whom he was a founding contributor to The New Republic), Gunther illuminates Hand's intense involvement with the public issues of his times, such as his enthusiastic support of Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive party. Gunther gives us a graphic portrait of a complex and uncommon man whose thoughts and words inspired generations of Americans and continue to do so today.