Learned Hand
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Billings Learned Hand (January 27, 1872 – August 18, 1961) was a United States judge and judicial philosopher. He served on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and later the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Hand has been quoted more often than any other lower-court judge by legal scholars and by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Hand also made some important decisions in the area of free speech. A frequently cited 1913 decision was United States v. Kennerley, an obscenity case concerning Daniel Carson Goodman's Hagar Revelly, a social-hygiene novel about the "wiles of vice" that had caught the attention of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. In his opinion, Hand recommended updating the law, arguing that the obscenity rule should not simply protect the most susceptible readers but should reflect community standards:
It seems hardly likely that we are even to-day so lukewarm in our interest in letters or serious discussion as to be content to reduce our treatment of sex to the standard of a child's library in the supposed interest of a salacious few, or that shame will for long prevent us from adequate portrayal of some of the most serious and beautiful sides of human nature.
