Goldstein, Abraham S.

English

Penn Law: Legal Scholarship Repository

ON DAVID BAZELON'S 25TH YEARAS A JUDGEABRAHAM S. GOLDSTEINtDavid Bazelon entered upon a judicial career at the age ofthirty-nine. Though he had been an Assistant United StatesAttorney, a successful practitioner, and an Assistant AttorneyGeneral, he had devoted little time to developing a detailed per-spective on the judicial function. His experience was more inthe world of affairs than in scholarship and reflection.What he did have, in full measure, was vitality, an appetitefor new ideas, and a determination to be great. I can remember,as if it were yesterday, our meeting when he interviewed me fora position as his first law clerk. At the time, I had some diffi-culty seeing how anyone only fifteen years older than I mightbecome one of the great figures discussed so often in the class-rooms I had recently left. It is a commonplace, however, that werarely recognize greatness, or the promise of it, close up. With-in a very few years, Judge Bazelon made his mark as a powerfulforce on one of the nation's most influential courts, and throughit on American law.In the beginning, he devoted a great deal of time to learn-ing his job. The work of the United States Court of Appeals forthe District of Columbia Circuit had far more administrativeand criminal law business than he had encountered in eitherChicago or Washington. His time was taken up with conceptslike "standing" and "primary jurisdiction," the attitude of re-viewing courts towards "facts" and conclusions found by ad-ministrative agencies, trial judges, and juries. In these years, heproceeded cautiously, trying to get a full sense of one area afteranother-not only its doctrinal outlines but its significance inthe legal structure and in society. He soon established credibilityas a judge who could satisfy the best sense of judicial craftsman-ship while at the same time not taking old assumptions or doc-trines too much for granted. He was intense-in his workt Dean and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law, Yale University LawSchool. B.B.A. 1946, City College of New York; LL.B. 1949, Yale University. LawClerk to judge Bazelon, 1949-195 1.DAVID L. BAZELONhabits, in his relations with his colleagues and law clerks andlawyers. One sensed an impatience to get past the preliminariesand find out what it was all really about, to get beneath the wordsand phrases which lawyers often repeat so ritualistically in theirbriefs-as if citation of precedent, even when inapplicable,were all there was to law.He quickly demonstrated a remarkable ability to projecthimself into the situation of persons affected by law-from thelowliest defendant in a criminal case to a public utility wrestlingwith problems of ratemaking. This capacity for projection madehim sensitive to others-whether they were colleagues he hadto persuade or litigants whose cases he had to decide. His inten-sity was reformist in its direction, but he was rarely a zealot andnever iconoclastic. Instead, he seemed always fired by a specialkind of innocence and idealism, a faith that somehow or otherif we would but try hard enough to bring intelligence to bear onhuman problems, life could be improved-albeit still less thanhe might like it to be.To him, there were, and are, no sacred cows, only prob-lems not yet honed enough by the right mix of compassion andintelligence. In one area after another, he has tried to apply aunique combination of the wide-eyed and the hard-eyed ap-proach. He was among the first, for example, to question closelywhat administrative agencies were doing, at a time when manywere persuaded that these agencies should be left almost en-tirely alone by the judiciary. Looking into their records, hewas startled to learn how often their findings of fact were ques-tionable, how often their rulemaking proceedings were skimpy,how suspect were the claims of special competence. Before itwas fashionable to worry about bureaucracy, he saw the risksof undue reliance on administrators, especially when littleattention had been paid to assuring adequate standards for de-cision. While criminal law and procedure were still relativelyundiscovered, he played a major role in opening to view theproblems of the poor, the inadequately represented and thementally disordered.In his twenty-five years on the bench, David Bazelon hasacted with the courage and sense of history required of a judgewho is determined to do justice.1974]

On David Bazelon\u27s 25th Year as a Judge

https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5294&amp;context=penn_law_review

On David Bazelon\u27s 25th Year as a Judge

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