Description
Book SynopsisAs featured on CBS Saturday Morning. Finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.
In Judgment and Mercy, Martin J. Siegel offers an insightful and compelling biography of Irving Robert Kaufman, the judge infamous for condemning Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death for atomic espionage.
In 1951, world attention fixed on Kaufman''s courtroom as its ambitious young occupant stridently blamed the Rosenbergs for the Korean War. To many, the harsh sentences and their preening author left an enduring stain on American justice. But then the judge from Cold War central casting became something unexpected: one of the most illustrious progressive jurists of his day.
Upending the simplistic portrait of Judge Kaufman as a McCarthyite villain, Siegel shows how his pathbreaking decisions desegregated a Northern school for the first time, liberalized the insanity defense, reformed Attica-era prisons, spared
Trade Review
A major judicial biography that earns a place of distinction alongside other notable recent works such as Tomiko Brown-Nagin's Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality, and Brad Snyder's Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment, Siegel's Judgment and Mercy gives its flawed, complex, and perhaps too-long-reviled subject the captivating, multi-dimensional chronicle his life and work deserve.
* New York Journal of Books *
The trial and executions of the Rosenbergs remain controversial to this day, and they've spawned a vast historical and polemical literature. Judgment and Mercy is the latest contribution. It seeks to provide a complete portrait of Kaufman by distinguishing between the bad judge of the Rosenberg trial and the good jurist who championed a variety of causes dear to the hearts of progressives. These included broadening the insanity defense, defending civil liberties and the desegregation of neighborhood schools, prosecuting individuals accused of torture outside the United States, and encouraging prison reform.
* Jewish Book Council *
Attorney Martin J. Siegel's well-written biography of his former boss (he was Kaufman's final law clerk), Judgment and Mercy, is fascinating and scrupulously fair.
* Washington Independent Review of Books *
There is more to Kaufman than the Rosenberg case, as Martin J. Siegel shows in his excellent biography.... [Judgment and Mercy] succeeds masterfully in illuminating the life of the ambitious son of immigrants who became a federal judge at the age of thirty-nine, angled to try the espionage case of the 20th century, and then had to live with the consequences of his actions the rest of his long tenure on the bench.
* Washington Monthly *
A meticulous and unsentimental inquiry aimed at solving the mystery at the heart of Kaufman's career. Martin J. Siegel's new biography has the virtue of persuading a reader that the puzzle is worth investigating.
* The New York Review of Books *
Table of ContentsPrologue: The Funeral
1. Isidore Mortem
2. Demon Boy Prosecutor
3. A Dream Come True
4. At Home on the Bench and Park Avenue
5. The Trial of the Century
6. Worse Than Murder
7. Immortality
8. Beaten by the Harvards
9. Apalachin and the Little Rock of the North
10. Elevation and Descent
11. The Forgotten Man
12. Hippieland
13. The Most Cherished Tenet
14. Annus Horribilis
15. Some Form of Justice
16. Keep the Beacon Burning
Epilogue: "I Can't Believe I'm Going to Die"
