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  • Henry Friendly: Greatest Judge of His Era by David M. Dorsen
  • Alan Bloomfield
Henry Friendly: Greatest Judge of His Era. By David M. Dorsen. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2012. 512 pages. Hardcover, $35.00.

I saw the book Henry Friendly on a table at the Oral History Association meeting in Tampa and recognized Friendly's name—one of his opinions was in a textbook I had when I was in law school. So I picked up the book and started reading; I had trouble putting it down. In Henry Friendly: Greatest Judge of His Era, author David M. Dorsen has written an impressive, comprehensive book about the life and work of Judge Henry J. Friendly. With a focus on what made Friendly "the greatest judge of his era," Dorsen captures the essence of Friendly's personality, and he shows Friendly's accomplishments as a judge by explaining some of the cases Friendly decided and how [End Page 138] the judge reached the decisions he made. Oral history played a significant role in the writing of the book: Dorsen relied, in part, upon tape-recorded interviews that David Epstein, an attorney, and Ellen Robinson Epstein, the director of the Center for Oral History in Washington, DC, conducted at the center in 1974 (Friendly's children arranged for the interviews). Dorsen also interviewed an additional 250 people, including members of Friendly's family, to learn about the judge.

Henry Friendly was born in Elmira, New York, in 1903; his parents were Jews. Friendly's father worked in the shoe business and later the mortgage business; his mother was a housewife who valued culture and the arts—she read to her son when he was young and took him to a theater where the Friendly family saw mostly musical productions. Friendly entered Harvard College when he was sixteen years old. After he earned his baccalaureate degree, graduating at the top of his class, he attended Harvard Law School, became president of the Harvard Law Review, and was first in his law school class. From there, Friendly became law clerk to United States Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. After clerking for Brandeis, Friendly went into private practice in New York City. At about this time, in the 1920s, he married Sophie Stern of Philadelphia. They had three children.

In the 1950s, Friendly, disenchanted with practicing law, decided he wanted to become a US Court of Appeals judge in New York City. He successfully sought a judicial appointment from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, asking influential people to write letters on his behalf. In his twenty-six years as a judge, Friendly had fifty-one law clerks (one of his law clerks was Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court John G. Roberts Jr.). They generally feared him: he had a somber attitude and could make critical statements; they knew he was brilliant, but they did not always know what he wanted of them. If a law clerk made a mistake, and the mistake showed up in a published opinion, Friendly would never let the law clerk forget it.

What about Friendly made him the greatest judge of his era? As a lawyer, he was the best-prepared person in the hearing room. He became good at cross-examining witnesses. He remembered things he had read. As a judge, he sometimes read the record of a case to help him learn the facts and reach a decision; sometimes he would research the origin of a statute to decide if it applied to the case on which he was working. US Supreme Court justices sometimes based their decisions upon Friendly's opinions in cases he had decided. Dorsen quotes former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor who, speaking about her own practice, said, "When we are looking for a Court of Appeals decision for use as authority, we look first for opinions of Henry Friendly" (354). Friendly had the intelligence and confidence to say a legal precedent did not apply to the facts or situation in the case he had to decide. For Dorsen, Friendly's "goal as a judge was to arrive at the correct result, not reward the...

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