U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn was a force to be reckoned with.
If lawyers crossed a line in his courtroom, he let them have it.
If reporters wrote something he disagreed with, he let them know it.
When critics called him difficult, he didn't care.
“I had never been a shrinking violet," Cohn said in a 2005 interview. "I was militant, excitable, forceful, occasionally probably interrupted people, occasionally irritated people.”
Cohn, an icon in the Detroit federal courthouse, who, as a young lawyer, represented looters in the 1967 uprising for free, dreamed for yea...