Judge Learned Hand is an icon of American Law. Though he was never nominated to our country's highest court, Hand is nevertheless more frequently quoted by legal scholars and in Supreme Court decisions than any other lower court judge in our history. He was the model for all judges who followed him, setting the standard for the bench with a matchless combination of legal brilliance and vast cultural sophistication.
Hand was also renowned as a superb writer. Now, in Reason and Imagination, Constance Jordan offers a unique sampling of the correspondence between Hand and a stellar array of intellectual and legal giants, including Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theodore Roosevelt, Walter Lippmann, Felix Frankfurter, Bernard Berenson, and many other prominent political and philosophical thinkers. The letters--many of which have never been published before--cover almost half a century, often taking the form of brief essays on current events, usually seen through the prism of their historical moment. They reflect Hand's engagement with the issues of the day, ranging from the aftermath of World War I and the League of Nations, the effects of the Depression in the United States, the rise of fascism and the outbreak World War II, McCarthyism, and the Supreme Court's decisions on segregation, among many other topics. Equally important, the letters showcase decades of penetrating and original thought on the major themes of American jurisprudence, particularly key interpretations of the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments, and will thus be invaluable to those interested in legal issues.
Most of these letters have never before been published, making this collection a priceless window into the mind and life of one of the giants of American law.

Considering a wide range of Renaissance works of nonfiction, Jordan asserts that feminism as a mode of thought emerged as early as the fifteenth century in Italy, and that the main arguments for the social equality of the sexes were common in the sixteenth century. Renaissance feminism, she maintains, was a feature of a broadly revisionist movement that regarded the medieval model of creation as static and hierarchical and favored a model that was dynamic and relational. Jordan examines pro-woman arguments found in dozens of pan-European texts in the light of present-day notions of authority and subordination, particularly resistance theory, in an attempt to link gender issues to larger contemporary theoretical and institutional questions. Drawing on sources as varied as treatises on marriage and on education, defenses and histories of women, popular satires, moral dialogues, and romances, Renaissance Feminism illustrates the broad scope of feminist argument in early modern Europe, recovering prowoman arguments that had disappeared from the record of gender debates and transforming the ways in which early modern gender ideology has been understood. Renaissance scholars and feminist critics and historians in general will welcome this book, and medievalists and intellectual historians will also find it valuable reading.