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.