Hand, Augustus Noble (1869-1954)

US jurist. He was appointed a US district judge by President Woodrow Wilson for the Southern District of New York in 1914, where he served with his cousin, the jurist Learned Hand. Elected to the US Court of Appeals in 1927, Augustus Hand earned a reputation for open-mindedness. In a 1943 ruling, he upheld the notion that Congress could limit exemptions from military service to those with strictly religious objections. He remained on the federal bench until the year of his death.

The son of a lawyer, Hand was born in Elizabethtown, New York. He graduated from Harvard University in 1890 and from Harvard Law School in 1894 before joining his uncle's law firm. He is remembered for his pungent comment about James Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922), which he called ‘a swill pail tragedy of the human soul at low ebb’; he did, however, join in the majority opinion that ruled the book was not obscene.