Leonard B. Sokolove, 88, former Bucks County judge

Lawyer, judge, soldier, father, husband - Leonard B. Sokolove was all those and more, a man whose love for country, community, and family was evident to all who knew him.

Mr. Sokolove put the "gentle" in gentleman, said his son, Michael, though he could be tough when necessary.

During World War II, he was awarded a Bronze Star for bravery after he faced enemy fire to pull a wounded soldier to safety during the Battle of the Bulge.

As a Bucks County Court judge, the rulings he made in complicated cases became in retrospect models of reason and foresight.

Mr. Sokolove, 88, died of congestive heart failure on Monday, Nov. 3, at his home in Pennswood Village in Newtown. On Tuesday, friends and family members recalled a man of surpassing intellect and kindness, who treated judges and secretaries with equal dignity.

Born in Philadelphia on Christmas Eve 1925, Mr. Sokolove was militantly liberal, an unreconstructed supporter of the New Deal who irritated his wife by voting for Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace in 1948. At one time he belonged to both the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP.

His greatest devotion was to his wife of 62 years, Doris - with whom he raised three children, Michael, Robert and Nancy - and who worked as his legal secretary before her death in 2009.

In an era when fathers could be distant, Mr. Sokolove embraced an engaged role. To him, raising children was not a chore but a privilege.

Michael Sokolove, a former Inquirer reporter, recalled how at age 7 or 8, he was hit and hurt by a pitch while playing Little League baseball. His father, behind home plate as umpire, didn't tell him to shake it off or toughen up. Instead, he gathered the boy off the ground, cradled him in his arms, and sprinted down the line to first base. People on the sidelines cheered.

"To me, he showed you can be a man in this world - not like a tough guy, but somebody of strong principles - without having this sort of swagger," his son said.

Mr. Sokolove loved baseball and especially the Phillies, and for years had season tickets at Veterans Stadium. He hated when people in front of him fidgeted in their seats or stood during the game. It bugged him when former Gov. Ed Rendell, who sat nearby, worked on crossword puzzles between pitches.

Mr. Sokolove grew up during the Depression, graduated from Central High School, and soon headed to war. As a radioman in the 63rd Infantry, he received the Purple Heart for being wounded in battle.

After the war, he graduated from Temple University and then its law school in 1951, all under the GI Bill. He practiced in Philadelphia, and also became solicitor to Bristol Township, serving the local government for 17 years during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1981 he was appointed to the County Court by Gov. Dick Thornburgh, and won election to the bench later that year.

Mr. Sokolove loved being a judge, Michael Sokolove said. As a lawyer, he disliked the business end of the practice, and becoming a judge allowed him to fully embrace the intellectual challenge of the law.

In 14 years as Orphans' Court judge, he presided over 3,000 adoption cases - often ruling in favor of what would later become accepted practice.

In 1990, for instance, Mr. Sokolove ruled against the effort of the county Youth Services Agency to stop a white couple from adopting the 15-month-old African American baby they had raised since birth.

The agency said its policy was to place children with parents of the same race. Mr. Sokolove ruled that love mattered more than color, and the couple could keep the child.

In 1994, he presided over the nationally watched "Baby Brittany" case, involving a Quakertown adoption agency that took away the Korean child of a man whose wife had died of cancer weeks before the adoption was to become final. Officials at Love the Children claimed that the father had become single and thus ineligible to adopt - and quickly placed the baby with a Massachusetts family.

Mr. Sokolove told the adoption agency: Give the child back to her father. The loss of his wife was no reason he should also lose his daughter, he said.

He also presided over a precedent-setting right-to-die case in 1995, where state authorities sought to prevent a mother from disconnecting life support from her 44-year-old son, who had been in a vegetative state for 20 years. Mr. Sokolove ruled that the decision was hers to make.

The case eventually reached the state Supreme Court, which upheld Mr. Sokolove's decision.

"He was without a doubt the most important person in my legal career," said Bucks County Court Judge Clyde Waite, who arrived in the county in 1972 as a young African American attorney and found that not one law firm would offer a job interview.

"Leonard Sokolove, when I asked to use their library for an afternoon, he offered me on the spot a position with his firm," Waite said. "He is a gentle, loyal advocate - I'm still speaking of him in the present tense - a person who was there to support and advance the cause of justice for everyone."

After serving as a senior judge from 1995 to 1999, Mr. Sokolove returned to practicing law, a profession from which he never fully retired.

"He was a man of a thousand stories," said Newtown lawyer Arthur Sagoskin. "War stories, stories of being a judge, of being an attorney. . . . He was interested in everything, and you could talk to him about any subject - politics, economics, the law. He was a genuine, warm, gracious, and exceptional human being."

A funeral service will be at noon Wednesday, Nov. 5, at Shir Ami synagogue, 101 Richboro Rd., Newtown. Also, friends may call from 2:30 to 8 p.m. Wednesday and 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 6, at the Barclay Terrace Room at Pennswood Village, 1382 Newtown-Langhorne Rd., Newtown.

Donations may be made to the Jewish National Fund at www.jnf.org; Temple University at www.temple,edu; and the ACLU at www.aclu.org.