Samuel Leibowitz - Anecdotes

Anecdotes

Some famous anecdotes on his creative thinking:

In a lecture on the laws of evidence, Leibowitz held up a pack of Camel cigarettes and asked his audience; “Is the man riding the camel or holding the halter and leading him?” Answers were divided but not one person, in two separate audiences, answered that there is no man in the picture on the package.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago recounts Judge Leibowitz comments, after his visit to a Communist Gulag death camp: "What an intelligent, farsighted humane administration from top to bottom. In serving out his term of punishment the prisoner retains a feeling of dignity." Solzhenitsyn wrote, "Oh, fortunate New York State, to have such a perspicacious jackass for a judge!" (The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2, page 147) Solzhenitsyn mischaracterized Judge Leibowitz' comments, using them as a vehicle to advance his critique of Soviet justice system. What Judge Leibowitz was shown was not a "death camp," but a "minimum security" prison at Krukovd, in which inmates were given an opportunity to learn the trade of their choice, where inmates' wives could come and stay for several days, and where the prison was "governed less by a warden than by a committee of some 10 to 12 prisoners." Judge Leibowitz' comments were directed at what he saw during his visit. Whether he was shown a representative prison is a different question. Judge Leibowitz also reviewed the criminal court system, and concluded that "the Soviet system of criminal law as a whole left much to be desired" and called it "bleak and disheartening" (p. 156), but also noted a few procedures he called worthy of consideration, including the "requirement that the defendant must be shown all the evidence against him before the start of his trial, a practice which would further bolster the rights a U.S. defendant now has." (Life Magazine, "The Two Faces of Justice in Russia," June 8, 1959, page 154).