By David M. Dorsen, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 498 pages, $35.
Not every New York lawyer may go along with the sub-title to this new biography. Yet few practitioners old enough to have appeared before Judge Henry Friendly or to have otherwise encountered him will take exception to the assertion of his greatness. In a foreword to the book, Seventh Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner calls Friendly “the most powerful legal reasoner in American legal history.” David M. Dorsen of the District of Columbia and New York bars has done justice to a jurist of extraordinary depth and accomplishment.
