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Learned Hand Biography

Billings Learned Hand (/ˈlɜːrnɪd/ LURN-id; January 27, 1872 – August 18, 1961) was an American 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 by legal scholars and by the Supreme Court of the United States than any other lower-court judge.

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Learned Hand Quotes

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

Furniture, Limited, Patterns, Upset, Virtues

The lawyer must either learn to live more capaciously or be content to find himself continuously less trusted, more circumscribed, till he becomes hardly more important than a minor administrator, confined to a monotonous round of record and routine, without dignity, inspiration, or respect.

Inspiration, Important, Routine, Respect, Administrator

Since we are men, we will play the part of Man.

Man, Men, Part, Play

Would we hold liberty, we must have charity- charity to others, charity to ourselves, crawling up from the moist ovens of a steaming world, still carrying the passional equipment of our ferocious ancestors, emerging from black superstition amid carnage and atrocity to our perilous present.

Atrocities, Black, Crawling, Equipment, Liberty, Steaming

The aim of law is the maximum gratification of the nervous system of man.

Gratification, Law, Men, Nervous, System

The public official must pick his way nicely, must learn to placate though not to yield too much, to have the art of honeyed words but not to seem neutral, and above all to keep constantly audible, visible, likable, even kissable.

Art, Yield, Too Much, Way, Words

The spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned. . . .

Liberty, Spirit, Thousand, Two, Years

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

Change, Choice, Choices, Past, Verdict

You cannot raise the standard against oppression, or leap into the breach to relieve injustice, and still keep an open mind to every disconcerting fact, or an open ear to the cold voice of doubt. I am satisfied that a scholar who tries to combine these parts sells his birthright for a mess of pottage; that, when the final count is made, it will be found that the impairment of his powers far outweighs any possible contribution to the causes he has espoused.

Doubt, Injustice, Mind, Pottage, Voice

Words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment.

Color, Environment, Reflection, Words

Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.

Attain, Believe, Justice, Law Courts, Road

Liberty is so much latitude as the powerful choose to accord to the weak.

Accord, Liberty, Powerful, Weak

We prate of freedom; we are in deadly fear of life, as much of our own American scene betrays.

Betrays, Fear, Inspire, Life, Prate, Scene

There is no fury like that against one who, we fear, may succeed in making us disloyal to beliefs we hold with passion, but have not really won.

Anger, Fear, Making, May, Passion, Succeed

Conservative political opinion in America cleaves to the tradition of the judge as passive interpreter, believing that his absolute loyalty to authoritative law is the price of his immunity from political pressure and of the security of his tenure.

America, Believe, Law, Loyalty, Political, Security

In america, there are two tax systems: one for the informed and one for the uninformed. Both are legal

America, Informed, Taxation, Two, Uninformed

Convention is like the shell to the chick, a protection till he is strong enough to break it through.

Convention, Protection, Shell, Shells, Strong, Till

Every smallest step of modern industry depends upon a cooperation whose maintenance and regulation is the very stuff of law.

Cooperation, Depends, Law, Maintenance, Modern, Regulation

The fathers who contrived and passed the Consititution were wise in their generation; as time passes, we come more and more to realize their powers of divination.

Consititution, Contrived, Father, Generations, Passed, Wise

It was not the violence of our enemies [in World War I] that would undo us, I thought, but our own spiritual weakness, the shallowness of our convictions.

Spiritual, War, Enemy, Weakness, Thought

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