After passing the
bar exam, Kaufman had a private legal practice in New York City from 1932 to 1935. He then became a
Special Assistant United States Attorney of the Southern District of New York from 1935 to 1939, and an Assistant United States Attorney from 1939 to 1940. He returned in 1940 to private practice in New York City. From 1947 to 1948, he served as Special Assistant to the
Attorney General of the United States.
United States District Court On October 21, 1949, Kaufman received a
recess appointment from President
Harry S. Truman to the
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. It was a new seat created by 63 Stat. 493. He was nominated to the same seat by Truman on January 5, 1950, and confirmed by the
U.S. Senate on April 4, 1950. It was the trial the judge would be most remembered for. This claim has not been verified, although it was shown that after Kaufman learned the
FBI and
Justice Department opposed death penalties in the case, he asked the prosecution to withhold its recommendation before sentencing. In the sentencing hearing, he called the Rosenbergs' crime "worse than murder", This enraged Jewish
Supreme Court Justice
Felix Frankfurter, who was opposed to the death penalty. He wrote to
Learned Hand, "I despise a judge who feels God told him to impose a death sentence", and also told Hand he was "mean enough" to stay on the Supreme Court long enough to prevent Kaufman from taking Frankfurter's place in the so-called "
Jewish seat" on the court.
Other notable cases • 1959: Kaufman presided over the jury trial in the federal government's conspiracy case against 21 of the
Apalachin meeting delegates. The guilty verdicts of 20 of the men, and the stiff sentences Kaufman meted out, were reversed and invalidated by the Court of Appeals. • 1961: He was the chief judge in
Taylor v. Board of Education of City School District of New Rochelle, which resulted in the North's first court-ordered school desegregation.
United States Court of Appeals On September 14, 1961, President
John F. Kennedy nominated Kaufman to the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; it was a new seat created by 75 Stat. 80. One week later, Kaufman was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and he received his commission the next day. He served as the Second Circuit's chief judge from 1973 to 1980. His notable cases included: • 1964: He wrote the Second Circuit's opinion in
Irving Berlin et al. v. E.C. Publications, Inc., a case that helped establish the legal precedent for the right to
parody. • 1966: Kaufman wrote an opinion in the case of
United States v. Freeman 357 F.2d 606 (2d Cir. 1966). The judgment overturned the rigid
M'Naghten standard for insanity defense and adopted the modern insanity defense described in Section 4.01 of
Model Penal Code developed by the
American Law Institute. The judgment embraced advances in psychiatry and emphatically rejected the M'Naghten test by stating that, "the outrage of a
frightened Queen has for far too long caused us to forego the expert guidance that modern psychiatry is able to provide." • 1971: In the case of
United States v. The New York Times regarding the newspaper's publication of the
Pentagon Papers, Kaufman dissented when the Second Circuit Court decided that publishing the Pentagon Papers would threaten national security enough to justify
prior restraint. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Kaufman and reversed the Second Circuit's decision. • 1975: Kaufman presided over the three-judge appeals court panel reviewing the deportation of
John Lennon and rejected the government's attempt to deport him from the United States to the
United Kingdom based upon his having pleaded guilty in England to possession of
hashish. After a widely publicized argument, Kaufman found that Lennon had been singled out for deportation for political reasons, allowed him to remain in the United States on what some observers characterized as a technicality, and criticized what he called the "labyrinthine provisions of the Immigration and Naturalization Act." • 1979: Kaufman reversed a lower-court decision in
Berkey v. Kodak; he ruled that "a company was entitled to protect its dominant position in the market by normal competitive methods; that the purpose of the antitrust law was to encourage competition, and not to insulate companies from competition, and that activity that resulted in lower prices and better products for the consumer was to be favored, even if that activity was harmful to individual competitors." The previous month,
The Washington Post sparked controversy when it alleged that Kaufman had only stepped down from the Second Circuit after he was promised the Medal of Freedom, a medal he long coveted. The newspaper claimed that Attorney General
Edwin Meese III and other administration officials had been pressuring Kaufman to retire so that President Reagan could appoint a conservative judge to the Second Circuit. The White House denied the
Post allegation, saying there was no
quid pro quo arrangement. ==Death and legacy==