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Academic

: The Faculty Lounge

"It is just an old picture of a person best left unremembered.?

By propertyprof

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Well, that's the question, isn't it? No sooner have I finished writing about last night's fabulous lecture by Justice Albie Sachs about how South Africa's Constitutional Court is made the site where a terrible prison once stood, but I see from our friends at abovethelaw that the Second Circuit is grappling with a question of what to do with a portrait of a disgraced judge.

The New York Times has the story about the portrait of Judge Martin T. Manton, who in 1939 resigned from the Second Circuit in the wake of charges that he took bribes. He subsequently served 19 months in prison. For many years Judge Charles L. Brieant displayed Manton's portrait as a reminder of judges' fallibility. And of human frailty more generally, I might add. Yet, now that Judge Brient has passed away, the Second Circuit's Chief Judge, Dennis Jacobs, wants the portrait back. ?The portrait is not much in the way of art ... It is just an old picture of a person best left unremembered.?

And there you have it: is Judge Manton a person best left unremembered ... or someone we ought to remember? That's one of the central questions of monument law, nicely wrapped up in onesentence.

Alfred Brophy

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on January 29, 2009 (boomark / email).