As 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 John Lennon from politically motivated deportation, expanded free speech, brought foreign torturers to justice, and more. Still, the Rosenberg controversy lingered. Decades later, changing times and revelations of judicial misconduct put Kaufman back under siege. Picketers dogged his footsteps as critics demanded impeachment. And tragedy stalked his family, attributed in part to the long ordeal. Instead of propelling him to the Supreme Court, as Kaufman once hoped, the case haunted him to the end.

Absorbingly told, Judgment and Mercy brings to life a complex man by turns tyrannical and warm, paranoid and altruistic, while revealing intramural Jewish battles over assimilation, class, and patriotism. Siegel, who served as Kaufman's last law clerk, traces the evolution of American law and politics in the twentieth century and shows how a judge unable to summon mercy for the Rosenbergs nonetheless helped expand freedom for all.

About the Author

Martin J. Siegel practices and teaches law in Houston. After clerking for Judge Kaufman, he served as an Assistant US Attorney in Manhattan and on the staff of the US Senate Judiciary Committee. His writing has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, and legal journals.

Reviews

A major judicial biography that earns a place of distinction alongside other notable recent works such as Tomiko Brown-Nagin's Civil Rights Queen and Brad Snyder's Democratic Justice, 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 twentieth 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 *

Full of rich content, Judgment and Mercy presents an illuminating biography of Judge Irving Robert Kaufman...Siegel's account was historically and legally enlightening.

* The Florida Bar Journal *


Awards
Short-listed for National Book Critics Circle Awards (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781501768521
Author Martin J. Siegel
Format Hardback
Page Count 448
Imprint Three Hills
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 33mm