If he would be a great lawyer, he must first consent to become a great drudge.
—Daniel Webster

The name of Billings Learned Hand (1872–1961) cast a long shadow over our first year of law school. As a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for more than thirty-five years, Hand—along with his more pedestrian cousin, Augustus “Gus” N. Hand, and former Yale professor Thomas Swan—had made that court the most respected in the nation. His appointment to the circuit in 1924 followed hard upon fifteen years of distinguished service on the federal trial court bench in Manhattan. Indeed, when Hand’s contemporary, Justice Benjamin Cardozo, was asked which of his Supreme Court colleagues was the greatest living American jurist, Cardozo replied, “The greatest living American jurist isn’t on the Supreme Court.” He was, of course, referring to Learned Hand.

In class after class, Learned Hand’s opinions appeared as exemplars of legal reasoning, articulating principles that we as yet were barely able to grasp in prose so eloquent—or, for the uncharitable, so orotund—as to reduce all but the most self-assured among us to paroxysms of self-doubt. From the “Learned Hand formula” for the calculation of damages in negligence cases—revived by the present-day “law and economics” movement—to Hand’s famous 1917 decision in Masses Publishing Company v. Patten—articulating a standard more protective of dissident speech than the “clear-and-present-danger test” of Justice Holmes, a standard that won acceptance by the Supreme Court fifty-two years