Legal History Commons^™

Reclaiming A Great Judge's Legacy, Frank M. Coffin

Maine Law Review

In the legal profession a deep sigh of relief is heard over the land. After roughly two decades of incubation, the long-awaited biography of the great judge has arrived, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge, by Stanford Law Professor Gerald Gunther. The book, in my opinion, is well worth the wait. Nearly 700 pages, plus a hundred more for footnotes, it nevertheless represents a heroic condensation of some 100,000 different items on file at Harvard Law School, including no fewer than 50,000 items of correspondence, 1,000 district court opinions, and nearly 3,000 circuit court opinions. The inventory alone requires …