Private: Senior Third Circuit Judge Edward Becker Passed Away

By Martin Magnusson, Editor-at-Large
On Friday, May 19th, one of America's leading jurists, Senior Third Circuit Judge Edward Becker, passed away. Nominated to the circuit court by President Reagan, Judge Becker's tenure included five years of leadership as Chief Judge of the third circuit.
Judge Becker authored several influential opinions during his time on the bench. He is universally loved for Mackensworth v. American Trading Transportation Co., a legal humor chestnut which he wrote entirely in verse (including footnotes):

The motion now before us has stirred up a terrible fuss.And what is considerably worse, it has spawned some preposterous doggerel verse.The plaintiff, a man of the sea,after paying his lawyer a fee,filed a complaint of several pages to recover statutory wages.

In a more controversial ruling, Judge Becker found it constitutional for a county courthouse to display a plaque of the Ten Commandments on the building, relying on an argument that the Ten Commandments are not exclusively religious in nature:

[W]e cannot ignore the inherently religious message of the Ten Commandments . . . however, we do not believe . . . that there can never be a secular purpose for posting the Ten Commandments, or that the Ten Commandments are so overwhelmingly religious in nature that they will always be seen only as an endorsement of religion.

Judge Becker was one of Justice Alito's colleagues on the third circuit and testified for then-Judge Alito during his confirmation hearings, saying that Alito is "not an ideologue; he's not a movement guy; he's a real judge." This drew criticism from writers such as Michael Dorf, who contended that such testimony undermined the institutional separation of federal judges from democratic politics.
For some, Judge Becker will be remembered, in the words of Marci Hamilton, as

the quintessential "mensch," the Yiddish word for a fundamentally good man. He is the virtuous man that the Framers hoped would be attracted to public service because they believed such men were necessary to make this experiment in constitutional democracy work. 149 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1237.

Orin Kerr has more here.