ABSTRACT
In 1947, a case came before the Federal Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston. Sitting on the three-judge panel were two cousins with the stentorian names of Learned and Augustus Hand; the third judge was Jerome Frank, a no less redoubtable and articulate figure. The case before them involved a resident foreign national, Louis Repouille, who was seeking American citizenship. The statute required that eligible candidates must be "of good moral character". The problem was that Repouille had killed his terribly malformed thirteen-year-old son almost five years earlier. The jury had convicted him of manslaughter in the second degree with a recommendation of "utmost clemency". Famous as a legal realist and head of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the years leading up to World War II, Frank's first book argued that judges were motivated by their personal psychological orientations while to the last he emphasized the fallibility and uncertainties present in the legal process.
