116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States
Cardozo enrolled at Columbia University at the age of 15, graduating as a Bachelor of Ars in 1889, he received his master’s degree at Columbia in 1891.
Gallery of Benjamin Cardozo
435 W 116th St, New York, NY 10027, United States
Cardozo attended Columbia Law School.
Career
Gallery of Benjamin Cardozo
Albany, New York, United States
Cardozo served as a judge at New York State Supreme Court for a year from 1913.
Gallery of Benjamin Cardozo
Albany, New York, United States
Cardozo was an associate judge of New York Court of Appeals from 1914 to 1926, rising to a chief judge from 1926 till 1932.
Gallery of Benjamin Cardozo
1 First St NE, Washington, DC 20543, United States
Cardozo worked as an associate judge of the Supreme Court of the United States from March 14, 1932 till 1938.
116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States
Cardozo enrolled at Columbia University at the age of 15, graduating as a Bachelor of Ars in 1889, he received his master’s degree at Columbia in 1891.
(Notable Opinions of Mr. Justice Cardozo; A collection of ...)
Notable Opinions of Mr. Justice Cardozo; A collection of notable opinions by the great Judge in the areas of civil rights, crime, contractual relations, injuries, estates, labor and social matters, and international relations.
(Judge Cardozo discusses the twofold need of law today--fi...)
Judge Cardozo discusses the twofold need of law today--first, a scientific restatement that will bring certainty out of the wilderness of precedent; second, a philosophy that will supply a principle of growth.
(The Choice of Tycho Brahe, including also the complete te...)
The Choice of Tycho Brahe, including also the complete texts of Nature of the Judicial Process, Growth of the Law, Paradoxes of Legal Science, Law & Lit.
Benjamin Nathan Cardozo was an American jurist who served on the New York Court of Appeals and later as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Cardozo is remembered for his significant influence on the development of American common law in the 20th century, in addition to his philosophy and vivid prose style.
Background
Benjamin Nathan Cardozo and his twin sister Emily were born on May 24, 1870, in New York City, New York, United States, to Albert Cardozo and Rebecca Nathan Cardozo, members of the Sephardic Jewish community in New York, whose forebears had fled from Portugal during the Inquisition. Cardozo’s father was a prominent New York judge, forced to resign from the New York Supreme Court in 1872 in the wake of corruption charges associated with Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. He died when Benjamin was 15, leaving Cardozo, whose mother had died when he was nine, in the care of his older sister Ellen, or “Nellie,” as he called her. The bond between the two siblings, thus cemented when Cardozo was a teenager, would form the chief personal attachment in Cardozo’s life, since he never married.
Education
Cardozo’s early education included tutoring by the famous author of rags-to-riches stories for children, Horatio Alger, who came to the Cardozo home and taught the future justice and his siblings. Cardozo enrolled at Columbia University at the age of 15, graduating as a Bachelor of Arts in 1889. Thereafter he continued work on a master’s degree at Columbia, which he received in 1891, while also attending Columbia Law School. The law school had only recently expanded its curriculum from the traditional two years of study to three. However, Cardozo decided he was adequately equipped to practice law without attending the final year and receiving a degree.
Later in life Cardozo was awarded numerous honorary degrees from different educational institutions - he became a Legum Doctor at Columbia University, Yale University, New York University, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, St. John's University, St. Lawrence University, Williams College, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University and the University of Chicago.
Cardozo was admitted to the New York bar in the fall of 1891, and at the age of 21 he joined the firm of Donohue, Newcombe and Cardozo, where his brother Albert was a partner and where his father had once practiced. After the death of Richard Newcombe and the departure from the firm of Charles Donohue, the two brothers continued practicing together until Albert’s death in 1909.
Cardozo never served the role of apprentice so common for many lawyers. From the beginning of his practice, he handled cases for clients on his own, gravitating early on to the more studious work of arguing cases on appeal rather than trying cases in court. Within a few years, other lawyers began referring appellate cases to the young attorney, and Cardozo showed himself precociously gifted in preparing briefs and arguing cases before appellate judges. Quiet and reserved, he found that this work suited him more than the rough and tumble of trial law. After two decades of such labor, Cardozo had won a reputation as a lawyer’s lawyer. His migration from the practice of law to the judicial bench, therefore, seemed natural when it occurred in 1913. That year he was elected by a thin margin on the Democratic ticket to the New York State Supreme Court—the court from which his father had resigned some 35 years previously. Almost immediately, though, New York governor Martin Glynn appointed Cardozo to fill a vacancy on the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals, in 1914. There for nearly 20 years, he established a reputation as one of the country’s leading judges, first as an associate judge on the state court and then, beginning in 1926, as its chief judge.
To his growing reputation as a judge, Cardozo added that of legal scholar. Invited by the Yale Law School to deliver a series of lectures there, Cardozo eventually published them as The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921) and The Growth of the Law (1924). Toward the end of the 1920s, he lectured at Columbia University and published the results as The Paradoxes of Legal Sciences (1928). In these scholarly works, especially The Nature of the Judicial Process, Cardozo attempted to explain how judges decided cases. Many cases, he believed, had only one plausible result.
When Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Court’s great liberal, announced his retirement at the beginning of 1932, Benjamin Cardozo was at the height of his professional power in the chief seat of the New York Court of Appeals. Many observers argued that President Herbert Hoover should appoint some progressive jurist of similar stature to replace Holmes, a legal titan in his own right and that Cardozo was a logical successor for Holmes. There were, though, numerous considerations counting against such an appointment. Cardozo was a Democrat, while the president was Republican. Cardozo was a New Yorker, and the Court already had two other justices from New York (Stone and Hughes). Finally, Cardozo was Jewish, and another Jewish justice, Louis Brandéis, already sat on the high court. But support for Cardozo was overwhelming, and the president nominated him as an associate justice on February 15, 1932. Easily confirmed by the Senate, Benjamin Nathan Cardozo took his seat on the Supreme Court on March 14, 1932. But by fall 1937 Cardozo’s health had taken a sharp turn downward, but he worked till his death in 1938.
Raised in the Sephardic tradition of Judaism, Cardozo no longer practiced his faith as an adult. He identified himself as an agnostic but he was proud of his Jewish heritage.
Cardozo was an active member of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in New York. He took a great interest in Jewish education and was involved in the activities of the Jewish Educational Association. He ardently believed in Americanism and remained aloof from Zionism in its early stages, but events in Europe during the 1930s led him to see the value of Palestine as a haven for the oppressed of his people.
Views
Cardozo's reputation had come as much from his writings as from his opinions on the bench, and in both he was known for a liberal, pragmatic and active interpretation of the law. Conservative judges of his day held that the law was static and fixed, much like the laws of Newtonian physics. Cardozo, on the other hand, upheld the opinion, both in his rulings and in his writings, that the law was a living, changing thing. The practice of the law, he wrote, was a “process [which] in its highest reaches is not discovery „but creation”. These opinions came out in all his writings, including The Nature of the Judicial Process, The Paradoxes of Legal Science and The Growth of the Law.
Quotations:
"The outstanding truths of life, the great and unquestioned phenomena of society, are not to be argued away as myths and vagaries when they do not fit within our little moulds. If necessary, we must remake the moulds."
"Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom."
"Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances."
"Law never is, but is always about to be."
"Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more."
"We are what we believe we are."
"Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances."
"We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is illusion."
"The risk to be percieved defines the duty to be obeyed."
"The prophet and the martyr do not see the hooting throng. Their eyes are fixed on the eternities."
"Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it."
"Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience."
Personality
Cardozo has been described as a charming, lovable man with a highly sensitive nature and a scholar with a brilliant mind.