FRIENDLY, HENRY JACOB
Henry Jacob Friendly served for 27 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where he won a wide reputation for his scholarly, well-crafted opinions.
Friendly was born July 3, 1903, in Elmira, New York. He graduated summa cum laude
from Harvard College in 1923 and from Harvard
Law School in 1927. In law school he studied
under Professor FELIX FRANKFURTER, later a
U.S. Supreme Court Justice, who recommended
Friendly for a clerkship with Supreme Court
Justice LOUIS D. BRANDEIS. After his clerkship
Friendly entered private practice where he specialized
in railroad reorganizations and corporate
law. He later became a vice president and
general counsel for Pan American Airways.
In 1959, President DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
appointed Friendly to the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the Second Circuit, where he remained until
his death. Although Friendly was a semi-retired
senior judge during his last years on the court,
he remained an active participant and was
involved in more than one hundred cases each
year. He served as chief judge of the court from
1971 to 1973. In 1974, Friendly took on the
additional duties of the presiding judge of the
Special Railroad Court, which was established to
deal with the reorganization of rail service in the
Northeast and the Midwest that resulted from
the BANKRUPTCY of the Penn Central Railroad
and the former Conrail.
Friendly wrote nearly a thousand judicial
opinions as well as a number of notes and articles
on a wide range of issues, but he is probably
best known for his work in the areas of diversity
jurisdiction, CRIMINAL PROCEDURE, and SECURITIES
LAW. Diversity jurisdiction refers to the
jurisdiction that federal courts have over lawsuits
in which the plaintiff and the defendant are
residents of different states. Friendly first
became interested in the subject when he was in law school, and one of his first articles was “The
Historic Basis of Diversity Jurisdiction,” 41 Harvard
Law Review, 1928. Later, after the U.S.
Supreme Court had established a new precedent
for cases involving diversity jurisdiction (Erie
Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 58 S. Ct.
817 82 L. Ed. 1188 [1938]). Friendly wrote, “In
Praise of Erie—and of the New Federal Common
Law,” 39 New York University Law Review,
1964. A few years later he provided an overview
of federal jurisdiction in Federal Jurisdiction: A
General View (1973).
During the 1960s Friendly became involved
in the debate over changes in criminal procedure
that were occurring as the U.S. Supreme
Court, in a series of decisions, held that many of
the rights guaranteed in the BILL OF RIGHTS
applied to the states. In “The Bill of Rights as a
Code of Criminal Procedure,” Benchmarks
(1967), Friendly expressed doubts about some
of the Court’s decisions and worried that they
would cut off debate in Congress and the state
legislatures that might have proved fruitful in
developing new solutions to the problems of
criminal procedure. He also criticized the decision
in MIRANDA V. ARIZONA, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.
Ct. 1602, 16 L. Ed. 2d 694 (1966), on the ground
that it was predicated on the unfounded
assumption that all CUSTODIAL INTERROGATIONS
are inherently coercive.
In the area of securities law, Friendly wrote
more than one hundred opinions, several of
them in the relatively new field of transnational
law, which deals with corporations that have
activities in several countries. He was also
notably unsympathetic toward white-collar
criminals who perpetrated financial frauds; in
United States v. Benjamin, 328 F.2d 854 (1954),
he observed that “[i]n our complex society the
accountant’s certificate and the lawyer’s opinion
can be instruments for inflicting pecuniary loss
more potent than the chisel or the crowbar.”
Friendly’s colleagues respected him for his
scholarship, his reasoning, and his self-restraint.
In 1977, he received the Presidential Medal of
Freedom from President GERALD R. FORD for
having brought “a brilliance and a sense of precision
to American Jurisprudence, sharpening
its focus and strengthening its commitment to
the high goal of equal and exact justice for every
American citizen.” As another federal jurist,
JOHN MINOR WISDOM, put it, Friendly was
“unsurpassed as a judge—in the power of his
reasoning, the depth of his knowledge of the
law, and his balanced judgment in decisionmaking.”
In 1985, Sophie Stern, Friendly’s wife of 55
years, died. Despondent over her death and
plagued by failing eyesight, Friendly took his
own life in his New York City apartment on
March 11, 1986.
FURTHER READINGS
Norman,Michael. 1986. “Henry J. Friendly, Federal Judge in
Court of Appeals, Is Dead at 82.” New York Times
(March 12).
