The Judge Who Asked to Listen

In 1961, when Learned Hand retired from the United States Court of Appeals after fifty-two years on the bench, a young clerk asked him what single quality mattered most in a judge. Hand, then eighty-nine and nearly blind, didn't hesitate. "The spirit of not being too sure you're right," he said. His colleagues called him the greatest judge never to sit on the Supreme Court, yet Hand spent his final decades increasingly aware of how much he didn't know.…