William Brevard Hand

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William Brevard Hand (January 18, 1924 – September 6, 2008) was a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama .

Contents

• 1 Early life and education

• 2 Legal career

• 3 Federal judicial service

  • 3.1 Desegregation cases

  • 3.2 Secular humanism cases

• 4 Death

• 5 References

• 6 Sources

Early life and education

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Hand was born in Mobile , Alabama , where his father, Charles C. Hand, served as president of the local bar association and founded the law firm of Hand, Arendell. His father had moved from Shubuta, Mississippi (on the Chickasawhay River in Clarke County near the Alabama border) circa 1920, where his father (Hand's grandfather) was a physician. Hand graduated from Murphy High School , then served from 1943 to 1946 in the United States Army as a combat infantry rifleman during World War II . He then used the G.I. Bill to attend college at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1947. In 1949, Hand received his Bachelor of Laws from the University of Alabama School of Law .

Legal career

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After admission to the Alabama bar in 1949, Hand joined his father's law firm, practicing until his appointment as a federal judge in 1971. Hand supported the Republican Party by 1962, in particular James D. Martin of Gadsden for the United States Senate against the veteran Democrat J. Lister Hill of Montgomery .

Federal judicial service

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On July 26, 1971, President Richard Nixon nominated Hand to a seat on the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama since Judge Daniel Holcombe Thomas had taken senior status. The United States Senate confirmed Hand on September 21, 1971, and he received his commission the next day. Hand would serve as the district's Chief Judge from 1981 to 1989. He assumed senior status on January 19, 1989, and continued to handle that reduced caseload until his death on September 6, 2008, in Mobile.

Hand roused controversy soon after his confirmation by hanging a large Confederate flag on his office wall. Illinois State University history professor considers Judge Hand an important figure in America's culture wars because of his longstanding disagreement with incorporation of the Bill of Rights at the state level, which he argues influenced Edwin Meese and Justice Antonin Scalia . Judge Hand's most public cases were of two types: involving desegregation and his concept of secular humanism.

Desegregation cases

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Desegregation of schools in Alabama, including Mobile, had been the subject of controversy since the United States Supreme Court's decisions in Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, but the legal case was first filed in 1963 by the NAACP Legal Defense fund on behalf of Birdie Mae Davis, and other parents organized by John LeFlore , the head of the local NAACP and who died shortly after being elected to the Alabama House of Representatives in 1971. That case was initially assigned to then Chief Judge Daniel Holcombe Thomas and appeals reached the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals several times before the United States Supreme Court decided it as a companion case to Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education in 1971, After issuing several orders in conformity with that decision, Judge Thomas assumed senior status and the case was reassigned to Judge Hand. By the time it reached Judge Hand, it had become primarily subject to negotiations, and consent orders. Judge Hand appointed a large advisory committee and two supervisory scholars, who assisted in guiding the process. Ultimately, Judge Hand dismissed the case in 1997.

Meanwhile, in 1975, Wiley Bolden and other prominent black Mobilians filed a lawsuit challenging Mobile's at-large system of selecting commissioners, that diluted the black vote, and Lila Brown initiated a similar lawsuit with respect to the Mobile County Board of Education. Because the city hired Hand's former law fi

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