January 27th

Chief Justice John Roberts is 56 today.

The actor James Cromwell is 71.

Mikhail Baryshnikov is 63.

Keith Olbermann is 52.

Sultry-voiced Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies is 50. At 29 People thought she was one of the 50 most beautiful. (Click the image for larger version.)

Peter Fonda’s daughter Bridget is 47.

Jerome Kern was born on this date in 1885.

. . . Then he met Oscar Hammerstein II, who became a lifelong friend, and the two collaborated on Show Boat in 1927. This musical gave us the songs “Ol’ Man River” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.” In 1933, Kern and Hammerstein produced Roberta, which included the famous song “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.”

Kern moved to Hollywood in 1935, and he enjoyed success there. He wrote “The Way You Look Tonight” for the movie Swing Time, and the song won an Academy Award. In 1941, Kern and Hammerstein wrote “The Last Time I Saw Paris” because Paris had just been occupied by Nazi Germany, and that song also won an Academy Award.

The Writer’s Almanac (2008)

Billings Learned Hand was born on this date in 1872.

Learned Hand served as a federal judge longer than any other man—52 years. His opinions were prodigious, totaled more than 2,000. covering every phase of the law from maritime liens to complicated antitrust cases. His tart observations (“Judges can be damned fools like anybody else”) were treasured. On the bench. Judge Hand was a formidable figure, a stocky man with the broad shoulders of his Kentish forebears, glittering eyes under dense brows, and craggy features that might have been carved by Gutzon Berglum. Intolerant of lawyers who strayed from the point or became too verbose. Judge Hand sent wayward attorneys scampering back to the facts with an acid query—”May I inquire, sir, what are you trying to tell us?”—or just a furious “Rubbish!”‘ Once, confronting the ferocious old judge at a Yale Law School moot court, a terrified student fainted dead away.

“A Mere Vaudevillian.” In writing his decisions. Hand followed the meticulous painstaking procedure that he demanded in his court. He invariably wrote three or four drafts of every opinion in longhand on yellow foolscap before the language and reasoning finally satisfied him. His opinions cut to the marrow of the issue and proceeded eloquently but rapidly to the point. Hand’s famed 28-page opinion on United States v. Aluminum Co. of America, in which he ruled that “good” monopolies had no more legality than “bad” monopolies, was distilled from 40,000 pages and four years of testimony, has been a model for every subsequent antitrust suit.

Above from Time obituary, 1961.

“What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. 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 mind 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; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.”

Judge Learned Hand to 150,000 new citizens of the United States, Central Park, 1944.