Hand, Augustus Noble

Hand, Augustus Noble (1869–1954) jurist; born in Elizabethtown, N.Y. The son of a lawyer, he graduated from Harvard in 1890 and from Harvard Law School in 1894 before joining his uncle's law firm. Woodrow Wilson appointed him a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York in 1914, where he served with his cousin, the jurist Learned Hand. Named to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1927, Augustus earned a reputation for open-mindedness. He is remembered for his pungent comment about James Joyce's novel Ulysses, calling it "a swill pail tragedy of the human soul at low ebb"; he did, however, join in the majority opinion that ruled the book was not obscene. In a 1943 ruling, he upheld the notion that Congress could limit exemptions from military service to those with strictly religious objections. He remained on the federal bench until the year of his death.