Who is this Great Legal Thinker? He is Benjamin Nathan Cardozo. His bust is located on the 2d floor reading room of the D'Angelo Law Library, behind the glass-partitioned consultation area, near the Bloomberg Law terminal. He is number 5 on Brian Leiter's list of The Most Important Legal Thinkers in American Law of the Past Century. Judge Richard A. Posner wrote a biography about him in 1990, Cardozo: A Study in Reputation. Yeshiva University named its law school the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in his honor. He wrote Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319 (1937), in which he explained the extent to which the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Bill of Rights as a constraint upon the powers of State governments. He also wrote the majority opinions in Palsgraf v. Long Island R. Co., 248 N.Y. 339, 344, 162 N.E. 99, 100 (1928), Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 (1937) and MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., 217 N.Y. 382, 11 N.E. 1050 (N.Y. App. 1916). He believed in judicial restraint and helped uphold significant New Deal legislation. Cardozo served on the New York Court of Appeals from 1914 until 1932 when President Herbert Hoover nominated him to fill the seat vacated on the U.S. Supreme Court when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes resigned. Cardozo served on the Supreme Court from 1932 until his death in 1938.
Cardozo was born a twin (with sister, Emily) on May 24, 1870, to Jewish parents in New York City. His family had teachers come to the home for his education. He reputedly lived almost as a hermit. He never married. He did not practice his religion, but took pride in his Sephardic Jewish heritage. He loved to read. After Cardozo's death, his friend, Irving Lehman, arranged to have his private papers destroyed. A bit of Cardozo survives in his letters to friends and colleagues in collections such as the Karl Llewellyn Papers.
Benjamin Cardozo was a founder and vice president of the American Law Institute (ALI). He lectured at Yale and Columbia law schools. He authored The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921), The Growth of the Law (1924), The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928), and Law and Literature (1931), among other works.
Thought-Provoking Quotes:
Per John Knox, Justice Cardozo wrote: "I wake up often at night with nerves on edge as the result of worry about cases...I am tortured. I could not sleep last night. Tomorrow we have a decision to make. This majority rule! This majority rule! A single vote may turn the scales. The responsibility is awful!"
“We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own.” - Richard A. Posner, How Judges Think 68 (2008)(quoting Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process 13 (1921)).
“Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it.” Berkey v. Third Avenue Railway Co., 244 N.Y. 84, 94, 155 N.E. 58, 61 (1926)
"The timorous may stay at home." Murphy v. Steeplechase Amusement Co., 250 N.Y. 479, 483 (1929).
“[J]ustice, though due to the accused, is due to the accuser also. The concept of fairness must not be strained till it is narrowed to a filament. We are to keep the balance true.” Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U.S. 97, 122, 54 S.Ct. 330, 338, 78 L.Ed. 674 (1934).
“Law never is, but is always about to be. It is realized only when embodied in a judgment, and in being realized, expires. There are no such things as rules or principles: there are only isolated dooms.” The Nature of The Judicial Process 126 (1921).
“[Some judges'] notion of their duty is to match the colors of the case at hand against the colors of many sample cases spread out upon their desk. The sample nearest in shade supplies the applicable rule. But, of course, no system of living law can be evolved by such a process, and no judge of a high court, worthy of his office, views the function of his place so narrowly. If that were all there was to our calling, there would be little of intellectual interest about it. The man who had the best card index of the cases would also be the wisest judge. It is when the colors do not match, when the references in the index fail, when there is no decisive precedent, that the serious business of the judge begins.” The Nature of the Judicial Process, at 20-21.
Selected biographical resources:
- Michael Ariens, Supreme Court Justices: Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870-1938)
- Cardozo, Benjamin Nathan (American National Biography Online)
- Judith S. Kaye, "Benjamin Cardozo" in Lawyers of the Century (American Lawyer Media, 1999)
- John Knox, "Recollections of Justice Cardozo," 21 Chi. B. Rec. 9 (1939-1940)(full text via HeinOnline)
- Joseph P. Pollard, Mr. Justice Cardozo: A Liberal Mind in Action (Yorktown Press, 1935)(with foreword by Roscoe Pound)(full text via HeinOnline Legal Classics Library)
- Stanley Charles Brubaker, Benjamin Nathan Cardozo: An Intellectual Biography (Ph. d. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1979)(ProQuest Digital Dissertations Online)
- Cardozo Is Dead; New Heart Attack Fatal to Justice/Justice Cardozo Dead at Age 68 (ProQuest News, The Historical New York Times, July 10, 1938, at 1, 30, PDF)
- Broad Philosophy of the Law Made Cardozo Influential in Supreme Court (ProQuest News, The Historical New York Times, July 10, 1938, at 30, PDF)(especially "Justice Cardozo, A Noted Liberal: He Identified Himself More Precisely as a 'Judicial Evolutionist'...")
- Proceedings of the Bar and Officers of the Supreme Court of the United States in Memory of Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, November 26, 1938 (full text via the HathiTrust Digital Library)
- George S. Hellman, Benjamin N. Cardozo, American Judge (McGraw-Hill, 1940)
- Andrew L. Kaufman, Cardozo (Harvard University Press, 1998)
- Richard Polenberg, The World of Benjamin Cardozo: Personal Values and the Judicial Process (Harvard University Press, 1997)
