By Jack Lessenberry
(Editor’s note: A public funeral service for former Federal Judge Avern Cohn, who died February 4 at the age of 97, was held Monday, February 7 at Ira Kaufman Chapel in Southfield. Jack Lessenberry delivered the following eulogy.)
Bob Sedler, a longtime and distinguished professor of constitutional law, often said that Avern Cohn was the epitome of a federal judge, that he “was everything that a federal judge should be and did everything that a federal judge should do.”
That is, of course, absolutely true. There are a lot of people here today – lawyers, fellow judges – who can speak to this with much more standing and authority than I can.
I am not a lawyer, nor am I, except by assimilation and cultural immersion, Jewish. But when you write a book with someone about their life, you become their alter ego, and I think I was also lucky enough to become one of his closest friends.
And I can tell you that the law and his Jewish identity were central to Avern Cohn, that the three principles of his life were the two maxims “Tikkun Olam,” to heal the world, and the ancient Biblical injunction “Justice, justice you shall pursue.”
I will do us all a favor and avoid butchering the Hebrew. But beyond his tradition, he had a relentless search for knowledge. It was well known that unlike many judges, he loved patent cases, because they forced him to stretch his mind.
He was always reading widely and somewhat eclectically. I once came over to see him to talk about a particular case and he might ask me whether I thought the KGB was behind the car crash that killed Albert Camus in January 1960.
I told him I thought it was just reckless driving. But his reading had a purpose beyond merely educating himself. You may think that Avern Cohn retired when he finally stepped down from the bench at the early age of 95 a little over two years ago.
He didn’t, not in the conventional sense. He continued to have an influence beyond the scenes via letters and phone calls and emails to journalists, politicians, lawyers and others.
Sometimes he took public stands. He called me one Sunday morning last summer and barked, “Have you read the new charter that the charter commission is proposing for the City of Detroit?”
I had to confess I hadn’t.
“Read it right away and call me back,” he said.
I did. I saw, as he did, that if passed it might bankrupt the city.
“You need to write something,” I said.
He said, “No. I’m just a retired judge. Nobody cares what I think.”
I disagreed, we yelled at each other for a while, and in the end he wrote a very good column for The Detroit News that was instrumental in galvanizing support against it.
After that, he wrote an incisive legal piece about injustice in the sentencing of Ethel Rosenberg, which led to a correspondence with one of Julius and Ethel’s sons.
Just days before he died, he completed a piece on flaws in the legal process in the Flint water cases that is awaiting publication. This was a man unlike any other 97-year-old I’ve certainly ever known.
He also inspired great love and loyalty from his co-workers, friends and family, wife, children, and grandchildren.
I want to pay special tribute, by the way, to the always lovely Lois Cohn, who graciously put up with my bringing out her husband’s inner nerd, although she did forbid us from sitting together at dinners after we spent one evening talking about Japanese war crimes trials and ignoring the other guests.
Avern Cohn wasn’t perfect. Some of you may be shocked to learn he had a little bit of a temper.
As some of you know, he wrote little notes to himself which he taped to the inside of the bench that said things like “smile at people,” “be nice to people,” and “remember that the lawyers have as much right to be in the courtroom as the judge.”
As far as I can tell, he never paid attention to any of that.
If I had been able to show Avern these remarks, he probably would have told me not to read them. He would have said, “Just say ‘he was a pretty good judge,’ and sit down.”
Sadly, he isn’t here to overrule my objection. Any of us could talk for hours about Avern, but I want to close by coming back to something that he thought about a lot. He said there were two kinds of Jewish judges; those who just happened to be Jewish instead of Methodist or Presbyterian or whatever.
But as for himself, he said his “Jewish values, the values of compassion and the need to seek justice inform the way I see the world and the law.” He was indeed, a Jewish judge.
Countless people, most of them not Jewish, are lucky that he was, and everyone in this room or who is here virtually is luckier still to have known Avern Cohn.
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