Irving Kaufman

Irving Robert Kaufman (1910 to 1992) was a United States federal judge, first on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and then on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where he was chief judge from 1973 to 1980. Born in Brooklyn and trained at Fordham University School of Law, he worked as a federal prosecutor before President Truman gave him a recess appointment to the District Court in 1949. In 1951 he presided over the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and sentenced them to death, the case for which he is most remembered. In his later career he issued rulings on the First Amendment, civil rights and antitrust law, among them the first court-ordered school desegregation in the North, the Second Circuit opinion in Filartiga v. Pena-Irala and a dissent in the Pentagon Papers case that the Supreme Court later vindicated. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1987.