EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen to the complete story and learn a lot more about this topic on my Politics and Prejudices podcast, available now on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, and available with video on YouTube and Lessenberryink.com.
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Justice under Law, and in Life
Avern Cohn has added considerably to my education in the years that I have known him, but two things stand out. One is his saying that “a judge who wants a case shouldn’t have it.” What that means is that it is essential that justice should be impartial and disinterested, and if a judge has a prior interest in a case, they may not be able to approach the case with a completely open mind.
He also told me once that he likes to be assigned patent cases. Now, a lot of judges hate those cases because they often involve a lot of complex and extremely technical details, and they can drag on for months or even years.
Judge Cohn likes them, he told me once, because they force him to learn new things. To me, that is the very definition of a mind awake. While I am not a neurologist, I can’t help but think that this may also be one reason that he is still extremely mentally agile at an age when the vast majority of people are, well, dead.
When I was young, I thought of judges, especially federal judges, the way I thought of the founding fathers. They were brilliant, but bloodless beings up there on the bench, something like angels in heaven, pronouncing from on high.
The reality, of course, is very different. Judges are human beings. Avern Cohn was an active sportsman in his younger days, a tireless traveler, someone who took safaris to see African animals in the wild and visited ruins deep in the jungles of South America. He was, and is, a leading pillar of the Jewish community.
He cares deeply about history, and was also active in local and state politics.
In 1961, he was very nearly named Michigan’s Attorney General when the post became vacant. However, the governor at the time picked another young lawyer the same age, Frank Kelley, who served in the job a record 37 years.
Judge Cohn was not happy – though when I asked him about this long afterwards, he said that he was long since reconciled to what happened. “Frank got the job he should have, and I got the one I should have,” he said.
I think that’s exactly right. I know both men fairly well. Frank Kelley was a distinguished attorney general, but couldn’t match Judge Cohn as a legal thinker.
On the other hand, Kelley is a superb Irish politician with the gift of gab. Cohn can be irritable and irascible, and I’m not sure he’d have been electable.
What is impressive, however, is that Judge Cohn knows and admits his weaknesses, and very few of us do that. He also thinks deeply about not only the law, but the human cost of every decision he makes.
Over the years, he has received more honors and awards than I suspect he knows, but I suspect the best and truest thing I could say about him was that he is, simply, a brilliant mensch.
Which means someone who can always be relied about to act with honor and integrity, a man who is responsibility fused with compassion.
But just don’t make him mad.
