Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Talk to the Learned Hand

If you ever want to make a law student smile, just say the name Learned Hand. Yes, that is a name of a real person.

Probably one of the most famous judges who never became a Supreme Court Justice, Judge Learned Hand is a favorite amongst law students. Yes, we love him because he has a fabulous name that elicits nerdy law school jokes (see title) and facebook groups. However, he also has some of the best opinions, insightful, reasonable, and actually easy to read. And for those of us who were actually good at math at some point in our lives, the liability formula = great.

Why do I write about him today? Because I learned that he actually had a cousin: Judge Augustus Noble Hand. My remedies book actually confused the book and had to publish a correction in the supplement.

Learned Hand, Nobel Hand . . . I wikipedia'ed these people to see if there were any cool family names, but did not find anything. Learned's parents were named Sam and Lydia. However, I did discover that his full name is actually Billings Learned Hand but he dropped "Billings" because he thought it was too "pretentious." Yes, Billings is much more pretentious than calling yourself Learned Hand.

And thus endeth the nerdy legal lesson of the day.

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