For many years, I had framed on my office wall these stirring words of Judge Learned Hand, knowing that they were his but nothing more about them:
“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded…”
Recently in preparing to receive the Learned Hand Award from AJC Long Island, a global Jewish advocacy organization, I did a bit of digging about those words, and found a rich reward. I’ll put aside the many things I discovered about Judge Hand himself. (For example, his given name was Billings—quite a name for a lawyer; Learned was his mother’s maiden name, which he preferred.) I’ll just stay with Judge Hand’s stirring message. Astounding that it was delivered May 21, 1944—70 years ago—when we were immersed in World War II, weeks short of our landing on the beaches of Normandy (D-Day).
