Art & Creativity Quote by Learned Hand

Calling publicity a "black art" is Learned Hand’s sly way of admitting what polite institutions prefer to deny: persuasion isn’t a side-effect of public life, it’s one of its engines. The phrase carries a double sting. It suggests something occult and technical at once - a craft practiced by specialists, half admired, half feared - and it hints at moral smudging. Publicity works, Hand implies, precisely because it can bypass deliberation and aim straight for appetite, anxiety, and crowd instinct.

Hand writes as a judge, which sharpens the subtext. Courts trade in reasons, records, and procedural legitimacy; publicity trades in momentum. By framing it as inevitable ("has come to stay") and accelerating ("every year adds to its potency"), he’s not offering nostalgia for a quieter republic. He’s warning that modern authority is increasingly negotiated outside the courtroom, in the noisy marketplace of attention where the best argument can lose to the best campaign.

The timing matters. Hand lived through mass-circulation newspapers, radio, World War propaganda, and the early architecture of public relations. He watched "public opinion" harden into an actor with veto power over governance and, indirectly, over judging: not through formal control, but through reputational pressure and the shaping of what citizens will tolerate.

The brilliance is the restraint. Hand doesn’t moralize; he diagnoses. Publicity isn’t a passing pathology but a permanent technology - and once you see it that way, the real question becomes who wields it, who funds it, and what happens to democratic judgment when attention becomes the court of first resort.