The trial and executions of the Rosenbergs remain controversial to this day, and they've spawned a vast historical and polemical literature. Judgment and Mercy is the latest contribution. It seeks to provide a complete portrait of Kaufman by distinguishing between the bad judge of the Rosenberg trial and the good jurist who championed a variety of causes dear to the hearts of progressives. These included broadening the insanity defense, defending civil liberties and the desegregation of neighborhood schools, prosecuting individuals accused of torture outside the United States, and encouraging prison reform.

Attorney Martin J. Siegel's well-written biography of his former boss (he was Kaufman's final law clerk), Judgment and Mercy, is fascinating and scrupulously fair.

A meticulous and unsentimental inquiry aimed at solving the mystery at the heart of Kaufman's career. Martin J. Siegel's new biography has the virtue of persuading a reader that the puzzle is worth investigating.

A major judicial biography that earns a place of distinction alongside other notable recent works such as Tomiko Brown-Nagin's Civil Rights Queen and Brad Snyder's Democratic Justice, Siegel's Judgment and Mercy gives its flawed, complex, and perhaps too-long-reviled subject the captivating, multi-dimensional chronicle his life and work deserve.

There is more to Kaufman than the Rosenberg case, as Martin J. Siegel shows in his excellent biography Judgment and Mercy succeeds masterfully in illuminating the life of the ambitious son of immigrants who became a federal judge at the age of thirty-nine, angled to try the espionage case of the twentieth century, and then had to live with the consequences of his actions the rest of his long tenure on the bench.

Full of rich content, Judgment and Mercy presents an illuminating biography of Judge Irving Robert Kaufman...Siegel's account was historically and legally enlightening.