Irving Lehman was an American jurist and Jewish community leader. He was Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals from 1940 until his death in 1945.
Background
Irving Lehman was born in New York City. He was the fourth of five sons (one of whom died in infancy) and seventh of the eight children of Mayer and Babette (Newgass) Lehman, both natives of Bavaria. His father was a founder of the important investment banking firm of Lehman Brothers. Irving was a brother of Arthur Lehman and of Herbert Lehman, governor of New York and United States Senator. He grew up in the affluent German-Jewish community of New York City.
Education
He attended the preparatory school of Dr. Julius Sachs and Columbia University, from which he received the degrees of A. B. (1896), A. M. (1897), and LL. B. (1898).
Career
Unlike his brothers, Lehman never entered the family business. He served as a law clerk in the office of Marshall, Moran, Williams & McVickar and was made a member of the firm in 1901; he later became a partner in Worcester, Williams & Lehman.
Lehman was elected to the Supreme Court of the State of New York in 1908, having been nominated, as a compromise candidate, on the Democratic ticket. He later attributed his selection to the influence of his father-in-law, a heavy contributor to the Democratic party and a close friend of Alfred E. Smith. Upon the expiration of his first term in 1922, he was reelected, this time with the backing of both parties. The following year, again with bipartisan support, he was elected to a fourteen-year term on the state Court of Appeals. Reelected in 1937, he served from 1940 until his death as chief judge.
Broadly interpreting the state's police power to protect the well-being of the whole community, he insisted that the legislature could fix prices of certain commodities, provide for the reorganization of mortgage guaranty companies, and authorize the Industrial Commission to set minimum wages for women and children. The spirit of these decisions was antithetical to earlier United States Supreme Court precedents like Lochner v. New York (1905) and Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923), which were revivified in the mid-1930's and reflected a restrictive view of the state's power to regulate the economy.
Lehman was similarly in advance of his times on civil liberties issues. He believed firmly that human rights are inalienable and God-given and was especially zealous in thwarting infringements of religious liberty. Thus he insisted that the state had no power to compel Jehovah's Witnesses, in opposition to their religious beliefs, to salute the American flag and held a peddlers' licensing statute inapplicable to religious proselytizers who go from door to door offering Bibles and tracts for sale. He condemned a contemporary New York obscenity statute as unconstitutionally vague and indefinite; restricted the use of labor injunctions to acts that are in themselves unlawful or involve unlawful means, and extended the New York Civil Rights Act's ban on racial discrimination in labor organizations to a postal employees' association, despite arguments that the law could impinge on federal power over the mails. He also condemned the use of third-degree tactics in police interrogations.
Courteous and kindly in person, Lehman was at the same time a forceful and uncompromising presiding judge. Unlike his intimate friend and predecessor as chief judge, Benjamin Cardozo, he was not a seminal thinker in the law. But he did speak for an instrumentalist juridical philosophy that was at odds with the postulates of the dominant obstructionist bloc on the United States Supreme Court in the mid-1930's. He articulated an alternative judicial position on issues of public law which could replace the dogmas of liberty of contract, dual federalism, and constitutional stasis--dogmas that had produced a proliferation of judicial vetoes on state and federal economic regulatory legislation.
Lehman also served on the executive committees or boards of the American Jewish Committee, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the American Friends of Hebrew University, and the Intercollegiate Menorah Association. He was president of the 92nd Street Y. M. H. A. and of Manhattan's Temple Emanu-El. Most of his free time, however, was given to the Jewish Welfare Board, whose policies he had shaped from its inception. As president from 1921 to 1940, he planned and supervised a difficult postwar transition during which the Board subordinated its wartime function as a service agency for Jews in the American armed forces to become the national coordinator of Jewish community center work. As a distinguished jurist and public figure, Lehman was chosen to give the principal address at a New York dinner in June 1945 honoring the triumphal return of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower after V-E Day. In what proved to be his valedictory, he extolled two ideals that he had done so much to bring toward realization: the brotherhood of all men, and the vision of America as a land of justice and opportunity. Several months later, at the age of sixty-nine, he died of a heart ailment at his home in Port Chester, New York. He was buried in Salem Fields Cemetery, Brooklyn.
On June 26, 1901, Lehman married Sissie Straus, daughter of the philanthropist Nathan Straus, who herself became active in local charities. There were no children.