Every federal judge is the product of an earlier life in the law. On the bench you continue to learn from colleagues, litigants and many others, but your earlier experiences powerfully shape your view of judicial excellence and your own aspirations. No two judges followed the same path to the bench; no two judges have an identical jurisprudence. Yet there are commonalities. One of these is that we have great faith in the American legal system, imperfect as it is, and its ability to provide an impartial forum for the resolution of significant disputes and to thereby sustain our democracy. There is no other legal system in the world with the same authority, dedication to excellence, independence and honesty as our system of federal courts. For more than almost 60 years now, I have been a lawyer in practice and a federal judge, litigating and then adjudicating cases of some significance in the federal courts. This memoir describes the path that I followed to the bench from my earliest days, how I now pursue my craft, and my sense of privilege in having been able to serve this system from both sides of the bench.

There are relatively few memoirs or biographies of the legal careers of circuit judges during the period that I have been in active practice and on the bench—from the early 1960s to the present. The only non-Supreme Court comprehensive biographies of federal appellate judges in modern times that I am familiar with are those of Learned Hand, Henry Friendly, William Hastie, Jon Newman, Richard Posner and Damon Keith. With the exception of Newman’s, none of these is in the judge's own words, and the Hand, Friendly and Hastie biographies cover an earlier period. There is, therefore, a dearth of information about what it was like to be a lawyer and then a federal judge during my time in private practice and on the bench. I thought that it might be useful to record what I learned and what I experienced.

This memoir was not at the inception designed for the general public. Rather, it was originally designed for my children, my grandchildren and their descendants.