With self-deprecating wit, he brushed away praise of his many accomplishments, but on rare occasions would tell an anecdote about the time he was a young lawyer appearing before the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, when the panel included legendary jurist Learned Hand. Never shying from controversy or decisions that seemed to split the thinnest of legal hairs, he once reduced a child-abuse murder conviction from first to second degree, noting that the syndrome of abusing children is a sickness and a social problem.