The Annual Bar Dinner, held at the Waldorf Astoria on Dec. 13, 1951, honored Judges (and cousins) Learned and Augustus Hand. In a speech paying tribute to the honorees, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson said that if he was “to write a prescription for becoming the perfect district judge, it would be always to quote Learned and always to follow Gus.”1 As he went on to explain, the Hands “have represented an independent and intellectually honest judiciary at its best. And the test of an independent judiciary is a simple one—the one you would apply in choosing an umpire for a baseball game. What do you ask of him? You do not ask that he shall never make a mistake or always agree with you, or always support the home team. You want an umpire who calls them as he sees them. And that is what the profession has admired in the Hands.”
On Jan. 9, 1928, Judge Augustus Hand, then sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, called it as he saw it in Zeig v. Massachusetts Bonding & Ins. Co.,2 and to this day courts across the nation have followed and continue to follow this seminal decision on triggering excess insurance. In the last few years, however, several courts have taken the time to reexamine Zeig. While a few courts, most notably in California, have questioned Judge Hand’s rationale and strayed from Zeig’s holding, most courts, including most notably the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, have reaffirmed Zeig’s guiding principles.
The ‘Zeig’ Decision
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