Learned Jeremiah Hand’s Personal Home Page

The weather here in North Carolina is incredible. We get a touch of all of the seasons, but unless it’s the middle of summer it’s usually pretty nice.

Dixie is at it again.

There is a civil war going on once again, and the Tarheels of North Carolina are fighting it out with other areas of the country. But this is no battle against the states, it’s just me being torn in different directions.

Growing up in Southern California the world looked a lot different. Our playgrounds included spillways, the surf, and warm streets lined with palm trees. And though you can take the boy out of California, I’m not sure you can ever take the California out of the boy.

So coming to North Carolina was a change of pace for me. Of course, I’ve lived in New York and traveled all over the world, but the battle for me now is between North Carolina and Southern California. Compared to some of the more famous cosmopolitan parts of the world, living in a small college town in North Carolina may seem lacking, but I love it!

Around here there is a way of life you just can’t find other places. We were able to sell a mid-sized house in New York and get acres of land here, with a forest in my backyard and a landscape full of trees and fields. Southern California may have all the fancy restaurants and big-city culture you could want, but you couldn’t buy fresh air and streets with no traffic.

It’s also a great place to raise the kids. Although they are only three years old, my children are already smarter than me - they know Spanish, Chinese and English! There is something just so wholesome about living here that I really love.

Don’t get me wrong, I still have a lot of fun. And when I go back to SoCal to visit, I definitely feel the tinge of longing to move back. But for now, Dixie seems to be winning this war between the states…

This is a picture of my daughter Sophia. Isn’t she beautiful? Only three years old and already inspiring great Dutch artists like Vermeer (or seemingly so). I love how this print looks so classical, like the famous image of the girl with the pearl earring.

(Click on the image to see a larger version)

People are often surprised when I tell them my name, they think it’s odd that anyone could be called “Learned Hand”. I always reply that maybe it’s their name that is strange. After all, my name is in the dictionary, and in almost any encyclopedia.

Of course, I can’t take credit for that. The Learned Hand you’ll find there is the famous lawyer who once said

“Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.”

He was an incredible man, and not just because of his take on conformity. He fought for free speech and other important issues during his tenure on the bench at the Second court of Appeals in New York, and (as Wikipedia’s article on Learned Hand points out) is considered by many to be the most influential American judge that didn’t serve on the US Supreme Court.

The fact that I boast the name Learned Hand is not an accident, however. My father was good friends with the judge, who once complained that he had no son to pass his name onto. And so my father decided to honor him by naming me Learned Jeremiah Hand.

The “Jeremiah” part is also an interesting story. If you do a search for the term Jeremiah Hand you’ll find references to the Jeremiah Hand house in Cape May on the coast of New Jersey. That Jeremiah was a wealthy landowner, and one of my ancestors. So when my father decided to give me a name that combined the monikers of such eminent men, I guess he was showing his hope for my ambitions.

The Hand family has known a number of prominent members, including those that can be traced back to the Puritans and the early American colonists. My brothers and sister and I were always taught to be proud of that heritage, and I guess being teased as a kid about having that name gave me the impetus to search out that family history a little bit more.

Welcome to LJHand.com, the personal home page of Learned Jeremiah Hand!

I started this site because I wanted to have a place to put information about me and my family, as well as some of the web sites I am associated with.