Learned Hand - Semi-retirement and Death

Semi-retirement and Death

In 1951, Hand retired from "regular active service" as a federal judge. He assumed senior status, a form of semi-retirement, and continued to sit on the bench, with a considerable workload. The following year, he published The Spirit of Liberty, a collection of papers and addresses that neither he nor publisher Alfred A. Knopf expected to make a profit. In fact, the book earned admiring reviews, sold well, and made Hand more widely known. A 1958 paperback edition sold even better, though Hand always refused royalties from material he never intended for publication.

Louis Dow had died in 1944, with Frances Hand at his side. The Hands' marriage then entered its final, happiest phase, in which they rediscovered their first love. Former law clerks have provided intimate details of Hand's character during the last decade of his life. Legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin recalls that Hand, scrupulous about public economy, used to turn out the lights in all the offices at the end of each day. For the same reason, he refused Dworkin the customary month's paid vacation at the end of his service. Shortly afterward, to Dworkin's surprise, Hand wrote him a personal check for an extra month's pay as a wedding present. Hand was known for his explosive temper. Gunther remembers him throwing a paperweight in his direction which narrowly missed. Hand had a habit of turning his seat 180° on lawyers whose arguments annoyed him, and he could be bitingly sarcastic. In a typical memo, he wrote, "This is the most miserable of cases, but we must dispose of it as though it had been presented by actual lawyers." Despite such outbursts, Hand was deeply insecure throughout his life, as he fully recognized. In his 80s, he still fretted about his rejection by the elite social clubs at Harvard College. He was convinced that his wife had rescued him from a life as a "melancholic, a failure I should have thought myself so, and probably single and hopelessly hypochondriac".

Learned Hand remained in good physical and mental condition for most of the last decade of his life. In 1958, he gave the Holmes Lectures at Harvard Law School. These lectures proved to be Hand's last major critique of judicial activism, a position he had first taken up in 1908 with his attack on the Lochner ruling. They included a controversial attack on the Warren Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which in Hand's opinion had exceeded its powers by overruling Jim Crow segregation laws. His views were widely criticized as reactionary and unfortunate, with most deploring the fact that they might encourage segregationists who opposed libertarian judicial rulings. Published as The Bill of Rights, the lectures nevertheless became a national bestseller.

By 1958, Hand was suffering from intense pain in his back and faced difficulty in walking. "I can just manage, with not infrequent pauses, to walk about a third of a mile," he wrote to Felix Frankfurter. "My feet get very numb and my back painful. The truth is that 86 is too long." Soon, he was obliged to use crutches, but he remained mentally sharp and continued to hear cases. In 1960, he worked briefly on President Dwight Eisenhower's "Commission on National Goals", but he resigned because "it involved more work than in the present state of my health I care to add to the judicial work that I am still trying to do".

By June 1961, Hand was in a wheelchair. He joked that he felt idle because he had taken part in no more than about 25 cases that year, and that he would start another job if he could find one. The following month, he suffered a heart attack at Cornish. He was taken to St Luke's Hospital in New York City, where he died peacefully on August 18, 1961. The New York Times ran a front-page obituary. The Times of London wrote: "There are many who will feel that with the death of Learned Hand the golden age of the American judiciary has come to an end."