Background
Augustus Noble Hand was born on July 26, 1869 in Elizabethtown, New York. He was the son of Richard Lockhart Hand, a leading lawyer of Essex County, and Mary Elizabeth Noble Hand.
Augustus Noble Hand was born on July 26, 1869 in Elizabethtown, New York. He was the son of Richard Lockhart Hand, a leading lawyer of Essex County, and Mary Elizabeth Noble Hand.
Hand attended public schools in Elizabethtown and the Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated from Harvard College in 1890. The following year he entered Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In 1894 he received the Bachelor of Law degree.
After a brief association with Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, and Colt, Hand became a partner in Hand, Bonney, and Jones, founded by his uncle, Clifford Hand. In 1914 President Wilson appointed him a United States district judge for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan). Sitting with widely acclaimed brethren, including his cousin, B. Learned Hand, he soon won recognition for his sound judgment, equable temperament, and great steadiness.
Despite his preference for the trial court, of which he had become the presiding member, Hand in 1927 accepted appointment by President Coolidge to the court of appeals, where he served until his retirement in 1954. While Hand's opinions rarely attracted the attention of the press, they were so thoroughly prepared, so fair in their statement of facts, so faithful to precedents, and yet so responsive to profound social changes and tolerant toward legislative experimentation that many of his judgments on common law, admiralty, bankruptcy, commercial and corporate transactions, taxation, procedure, and administrative law were selected for students' casebooks.
Although less brilliant than his cousin, colleague, and lifelong companion, Hand was the sounder jurist. Hand deliberately circumscribed his nonjudicial activities, but still served Harvard as an overseer (1936-1942) and as president of the general alumni association (1944-1945). He was also a member of the executive committee and council of the American Law Institute and an adviser on the institute's restatement of torts and its code of evidence.
Hand was a vestryman of Grace Episcopal Church in New York and a trustee of the Congregational Church in Elizabethtown, associations that contributed to what his colleague Judge Charles E. Clark considered his finest opinion, United States v. Kauten (1943), which held that Congress could constitutionally limit exemption from military service to those having strictly religious objections.
He died while vacationing in Middlebury, Vermont.
In attitude and appearance, Hand might have been one of Oliver Cromwell's substantial, solid supporters. The portrait by Sidney Dickinson in the Harvard Law Library conveys his gravitas. He was also modest in self-appraisal, and committed to the rights of others. He considered it a personal duty to work unobtrusively for the commonweal. Yet Hand eschewed stuffiness, pretense, and pomposity. In his private communications he revealed a country-bred humor, stimulated by perceptive personal insights, wide experience in handling complicated controversies, and a tolerance fostered by the pluralistic city in which he held court. His comment on James Joyce's Ulysses is illustrative - "a swill-pail tragedy of the human soul at low ebb. " Characteristically, he offered this estimate only in a letter to a former law clerk and omitted it from the opinion that the book was not obscene.
As Justice Robert H. Jackson quipped, "Quote B. but follow Gus. " C. C. Burlingham, long an acknowledged first citizen of the New York bar, described Hand's character as "open-minded and fearless; wise and unwavering. "
Hand's marriage, on August 5, 1899, to Susan Train, the daughter of a captain in the United States Navy, profoundly influenced his style of quiet, dignified, humanistic living. They had one daughter, but Hand added to his family, as it were, the score of young law clerks who thought of him as a second father.
