Natural inside Albany, New York, he attended the Albany Academy before training around law and philosophy at Harvard, studying under William James, Josiah Royce and George Santayana. He began practicing law inside Albany so within New York City.

Hand served on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York from 1909 to 1924 (see Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, 244 F. 535 (S.D.North.Y. 1917), & on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1924 until 1951. Hand's judicial opinions come often considered classic formative statements of Our contries contract and tort law. One of his best known holdings, ordinarily known as a calculus of negligence, comes from United States v. Carroll Towing, 159 F.2d 169 (2d Cir. 1947). the example was caring by using civil civil wrong liability inside the example alleging damage when a boat-creator's failure to adequately locate his vessel at harbor:

The calculus requires that financial liability should only be imposed for a tort if the burden of preventing the injury does not exceed the magnitude of the injury multiplied by its likelihood of occurring. The rule, also sometimes referred to as the "Hand Test," is most notable for its economic approach to a legal rule; an approach that is the foundation of the law and economics school of legal thought. Like many others in the law and economics school, most notably Judge Richard Posner, Hand was also influenced by philosophical pragmatism.

Hand's cousin, Augustus Noble Hand, was also a judge and also served on both the N.Y. Southern District and the Second Circuit courts substantially during Learned's tenure at each.

Notes
Some online sources report Hand's date of death as August 14. This article uses August 18, which is the date given in the [http://air.fjc.gov/servlet/tGetInfo?jid=965 Federal Judiciary Center profile] of Judge Hand in addition to many other sources.