An acquaintance of mine, a rising star among lawyers who practice before the Supreme Court, asked me what I was reading these days. When I replied, “A biography of Judge Irving Kaufman,” the young man looked puzzled. “The name sounds familiar,” he said. “Who was he?” “The judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs to death,” I offered. He nodded in recognition. “Oh, yes, of course.”
Kaufman, who was still serving on the federal appeals court in New York when he died in 1992 at the age of eighty-one, would have been dismayed by that exchange but not surprised. He knew—the world would not let him forget—that a single decision, eighteen months into a judicial career that lasted another four decades, would be his legacy, a personal sentence that could never be commuted.
