Judge John T. Noonan, Jr. A Brief Biography

Extract

Judge John T. Noonan, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, is one of the most accomplished and diversely talented jurists in the recent history of the federal courts. Philosopher, theologian, historian, and poet, Noonan has been, first and foremost, a scholar of the law. He has devoted his professional career to a truth which we frequently lose sight of: the law, so seemingly complete in itself as a system of thought and expression, is an essential branch of general literature. A science, however inexact, the law is a humanistic pursuit as well, and no one in the past four decades has pursued the law with such humanistic fervor—a humanism enlivened by religion—as John Noonan.

Stereotypes tend to perpetuate images far outdistanced by events. Massachusetts, founded by the Congregationalist English, had by the early nineteenth century become a Unitarian stronghold and a mecca for immigration from Ireland and Canada. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the new Catholic archbishop of Boston could announce (in 1908) that the Catholic Church in Massachusetts had assumed the mission of the Puritan Church. By the time Noonan came of age, the divisions of the nineteenth century surfaced chiefly in the superficialities that often serve as voting guides: Massachusetts would elect a good Catholic to statewide office in preference to a Protestant, but a good Protestant in preference to a bad Catholic. Ethnic differences had become blurred by economic changes; religion was important, but subordinate to civic responsibilities.