Road to the Robes
A Federal Judge Recollects Young Years & Early Times
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My mother was sobbing. “Please, God, help us. Please, God, don’t let them hurt my babies!” she said. She was trembling and had her arms around my brother and me. We were in her bedroom, peaking underneath the blind that was drawn in a front window.
It was the summer of 1922, and this is the first thing that I remember in my life. My mother was terrified because I was only three years old, my brother Caesar was just a year older, my father was out of town and some visitors had “come a’calling.” It was in the evening but still daylight when they came. Caesar and I had been playing in the front yard when we first saw them: they were marching around the corner where Shearer’s Hill ends and
They were the Ku Klux Klan.
Dressed in full regalia with white robes and white hoods, they marched in a single file, a small procession. After we saw them, we ran screaming to mother who had been on the porch. She immediately hustled us inside, locked the front door and rushed us upstairs. From her front bedroom window we watched them, ten or twelve of them, enter our yard in single file. Then silently they walked in a circle.
They said not a word. They simply walked in a circle in our tiny yard, around and around. They uttered no threats. They simply kept walking in that circle. Walking in that circle, dressed in long white robes that dragged along the ground, their heads covered with tall, pointed hoods with slits for the eyes, nose and mouth. No one spoke a word during their ritualistic exercise. In time they left. They left, as silently as they had come, probably to one of the houses nearby, to shed their robes and hoods, and return to their various homes as neighbors of the Aldisert family.
The Klan was sending my family a message. A message to get out. To get out of the neighborhood. To them we were not Americans, although my mother and we kids had been born in
To them we were Italians. We were foreigners, and as foreigners my parents had no right to buy a
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About the Book
“Judges come to their robes bearing the stigmata of past experience.”
If this old saying is true, then this book describes the stigmata of Ruggero J. Aldisert, Senior U.S. Circuit Judge, a distinguished member of the Greatest Generation who’s still active as a judge on the second highest court in the land, just a notch below the U.S. Supreme Court. There is a huge sweep in these pages. Born in 1919, the author takes the reader from his early childhood to 1968, when he first put on robes as a U.S. Circuit Judge.
You’ll find no stodgy writing here, nary a “whereas” and “aforesaid,” but it’s what the author says in his preface–a great-grandfather sitting back with the young ones and reminiscing how it was to grow up before dial telephones and when the first radio was a crystal set powered with two batteries and you listened with a set of earphones.
But it’s more than family memoirs; there’s a lot of history set in the Twenties, and Thirties, and most of the time it wasn’t to the tune of “Happy Days are Here Again.”
Judge Aldisert grew up as the son of an Italian immigrant in a Pennsylvania steel mill and coal mining town, remembers the Twenties when men worked 12-hour shifts, except every other Sunday when it was a 24-hour shift, came face to face with the Great Depression, the spread of world conflict during his 1937-1941 college years, and describes World War II service as Marine Corps officer in the Pacific.
He gives an insider’s view of a lawyer who tried both civil and criminal cases, of life as a Pittsburgh trial court judge, and of the rocky road to nomination by President Lyndon B. Johnson and confirmation by the U.S. Senate in 1968.
About the Author
Ruggero J. Aldisert is a well-known federal appellate judge and author, and has served as an adjunct professor at several law schools. He is a Senior U.S. Circuit Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in
He was Adjunct Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh School of Law 1963 -1986, and a visiting professor at schools of law at
A graduate of the
He served on active duty in United States Marine Corps for four years during World War II, attaining the rank of captain. While serving the USMC reserves for five years thereafter, he was promoted to the rank of major.
His other books include: Winning on Appeal: Better Briefs and Oral Argument (2d Ed NITA 2003); Opinion Writing (West 1990); Logic for Lawyers: A Guide to Clear Legal Thinking; (3d. Ed) (NITA 1997) ;The Judicial Process: Text, Materials and Cases (2d.ed.) (West 1996). In addition he had written over 30 articles in professional publications.
He has lectured on before lawyers, judges and students throughout the
An example of the professional respect accorded the author is the comment of Harry A. Blackmun, Justice, United States Supreme Court, 1970-1997) in the Foreword to Judge Aldisert’s book, The Judicial Process: Text, Materials and Cases:
Judge Aldisert loves the law. He yearns to know its history and its character or, to use the word he has employed effectively used in this volume, its anatomy. He wants to know what it is, why it is what it is, and how all of us who labor in its vineyard use of misuse it.