(b. New York City, 24 May 1870; d. Port Chester, N.Y., 9 July 1938; interred Cypress Hills Cemetery, Long Island, N.Y.), associate justice, 1932–1938. The son of Albert Cardozo and Rebecca Washington, Benjamin Cardozo was born into a community of persecuted Spanish and Portuguese Jews established in New Amsterdam in 1654. Governor Peter Stuyvesant attempted to expel them but was overruled by the Dutch West India Company. Cardozo's family produced distinguished patriots including Emma Lazarus, whose words once adorned the Statue of Liberty.

Cardozo was educated at Columbia College and Law School and practiced law in New York City. He was a member of the New York Court of Appeals from 1914 and chief judge from 1926 until his appointment to the United States Supreme Court in 1932.

While on the New York Court of Appeals, Cardozo became America's most celebrated state common law judge. In tort law he is most renowned for expanding the class of persons to whom a legal duty is owed. MacPherson v. Buick (1916) has become the fountain of products liability and Ultramares Corporation v. Touche (1931) similarly expanded the law of fraud to protect third parties. In contract law Cardozo was most closely associated with efforts to instill fairness into ambiguous contracts rather than permitting contracts to fail and entrap one of the parties. Cardozo understood that intentions are often unexpressed, indeed unformed, and must often be presumed. He substituted a presumption of mutually cooperative behavior for a presumption of purely competitive behavior (Jacob and Youngs v. Kent, 1921).

His method of reaching these decisions made Cardozo the standard‐bearer for a movement that came to dominate American legal thought. While serving on the Court of Appeals he was invited to deliver the Storrs Lectures at Yale, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921), which became his classic statement of the proper judicial decision‐making process. Cardozo argued for what he described as sociological jurisprudence, rooted in a sophisticated understanding of positivist jurisprudence and expressed with elegance and clarity. He led both bench and bar to interpret law guided by its purpose and function rather than as purely conceptual or “formal.” As he wrote later in Carter v. Carter Coal Co. (1936), “a great principle of constitutional law is not susceptible of comprehensive statement in an adjective” (p. 327).

Cardozo's appointment to the Supreme Court was urged with unique unanimity on President Herbert Hoover. Cardozo, however, moved from a leader on the New York court to a dissenter for most of his career in Washington. Like Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom he succeeded, he joined Justices Louis D. Brandeis and Harlan Fiske Stone insisting on deference to Congress and the states. They succeeded in redefining constitutional law in a series of cases beginning in 1937 just before Cardozo's death. He delivered the opinions in Steward Machine Co. v. Davis (1937) and Helvering v. Davis (1937) in which the Court, reversing itself on the nature of federalism, upheld the power of Congress under the taxing and spending clauses to enact provisions of the Social Security Act.

Prior law had been based on a set of judicially defined mutually exclusive rights and powers (see Separation of Powers). Deference to other branches of government required rethinking every aspect of constitutional law. After 1937 both rights and powers would be understood as concurrent and overlapping. Concurrent and overlapping rights and powers leave boundaries undefined. Cardozo led the way in substituting a new constitutional rationale for the now absent boundaries. He contributed to that redefinition most memorably in Palko v. Connecticut (1937), in which Cardozo's formula, “the essence of a scheme of ordered liberty” (p. 325), became the basis for the incorporation of most of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment and eventuated in making those provisions applicable to the states. In a related area, Cardozo wrote for a deeply divided Court in Nixon v. Condon (1932), one of the early white primary cases, that a state may not authorize a committee of a political party to exclude members of a racial minority from a party primary.

Cardozo's opinions, like those of Holmes and Brandeis, are cited for the authority of the author and the clarity of his pen. He is remembered in innumerable current opinions of members of the Supreme Court for his attention to justice, his emphasis on the purpose of law, and for his majestic description of the relationship between policy and precedent in his books and opinions.

Bibliography

• Felix Frankfurter, Mr. Justice Cardozo and Public Law, Columbia Law Review 39 (1939): 88–118, Harvard Law Review 52 (1939): 440–470, Yale Law Journal 48 (1939): 458–488.
• Warren A. Seavey, Mr. Justice Cardozo and the Law of Torts, Columbia Law Review 39 (1939): 20–55, Harvard Law Review 52 (1939): 372–407, Yale Law Journal 48 (1939): 390–425

— Stephen E. Gottlieb

Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (1870-1938) was one of the greatest legal philosophers to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Born in New York City on May 24, 1870, Benjamin Cardozo was of Jewish parentage. His ancestors had come to America in colonial times. On the maternal side, his great-great-uncle Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas was present at George Washington's presidential inauguration, and on the paternal side, his great-great-grandfather Aaron Nunez Cardozo emigrated from London in the 18th century.

Cardozo attended the public schools of New York City. At the age of 15 he entered Columbia College, where in 1889 he received his bachelor of arts degree. He delivered the commencement oration of The Altruist in Politics. Just 20 years old when he received his master of arts in political science, he went on to study at Columbia School of Law and graduated in 2 years with a bachelor of laws degree. Admitted to practice in 1892, he became an expert in the highly technical field of commercial law.

For 20 years Cardozo had a successful private practice, specializing in appellate law. He was constantly consulted by lawyers on intricate legal questions and was known as a "lawyer's lawyer," arguing complex points before the appellate courts.

Appellate Bench

Though not a politician in any way, Cardozo wanted to become a judge. In 1913, running as an independent Democrat, he was elected to a 14-year term on the New York Supreme Court. However, he was on the court for only a month when he was appointed to serve temporarily as associate judge of the highest court of the state, the Court of Appeals. His appointment came at the request of the court, which had been asked to nominate a candidate. The esteem in which he was held by his judicial colleagues is evident in this most extraordinary move. On Jan. 15, 1917, New York's governor named him a regular member of the Court of Appeals. In November 1917 Cardozo was elected to a full term on the court, subsequently becoming chief judge. The New York Court of Appeals reached the height of its reputation during this period.

U.S. Supreme Court

In 1932 Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., retired from the U.S. Supreme Court. President Herbert Hoover invited Cardozo to serve because "the whole country demands the one man who could best carry on the great Holmes tradition of philosophic approval to modern American jurisprudence." The U.S. Senate confirmed the appointment unanimously. This was the same Senate that had rejected two previous Hoover nominees. Cardozo took his seat on Mar. 14, 1932.

A man with a mind as active as Cardozo's was bound to find an outlet in writing. In 1921 he published his first work, The Nature of the Judicial Process, and 3 years later The Growth of the Law appeared. The Paradoxes of Legal Science was published in 1928. Shortly after he moved to the U.S. Supreme Court his last work, Law and Literature and Other Essays, was published.

Cardozo's Opinions

Many of Cardozo's extraordinary qualities as a judge are revealed by his Supreme Court opinions. For example, his majority opinion in Steward Machine Co. v. Davis (1931) clearly indicated his belief that the Constitution must serve the changing needs of the people. In United States v. Butler (1936) Cardozo dissented, along with justices Louis Brandeis and Harlan Stone, declaring that the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 was unconstitutional.

Justice Cardozo wrote for the majority in the 8-to-1 decision on the case Palko v. Connecticut (1937). Palko had been indicted and tried for murder in the first degree, but a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder, and he was given a life sentence. However, a Connecticut statute permitted the state to appeal rulings and decisions "upon all questions of law arising on the trial of criminal cases." The state appealed, and a new trial was ordered. Palko was again tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death and this second conviction was affirmed by the highest state court. Palko then brought the case to the Supreme Court on appeal, contending that he was being placed in double jeopardy in violation of the 5th Amendment.

The importance of this opinion was not in the fact that the Supreme Court found that Palko had suffered no loss of his rights under the Constitution, but in what Cardozo said about the 5th Amendment's self-incriminating clause. He wrote: "This (privilege against self-incrimination) too might be lost and justice still be done. Indeed, today as in the past there are students of our penal system who look upon the immunity as a mischief rather than a benefit, and who would limit its scope, or destroy it altogether. No doubt there would remain the need to give protection against torture, physical or mental. Justice, however, would not perish if the accused were subject to a duty to respond to ordinary inquiry."

Writing the majority decision in Helvering v. Davis (1937), Cardozo moved into the area of constitutional law. This case decided that the old-age pension phase of the social security program was constitutional. Cardozo made the issue clear when he declared, "Congress may spend money in aid of the 'general welfare."'

Cardozo voted with the majority in a number of cases that set legal precedents. In Nebbia v. New York (1934) he agreed that a New York law establishing the price of milk was constitutional because: "Price control, like any form of regulation is unconstitutional only if arbitrary, discriminatory, or demonstrably irrelevant to the policy the legislation is free to adopt…. " In West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937) the Court determined that a minimum-wage law enacted in the state of Washington was constitutional, overruling an earlier Supreme Court opinion. In finding for the plaintiff the Court opened the gates to social legislation passed by state legislatures.

Late in 1937 Justice Cardozo began to feel the pressures of his judicial responsibilities. He was tired. He had never married, and most of his family was dead. Judge Irving Lehman, who had been on the New York Court of Appeals with Cardozo, invited him to stay at his home. As the months wore on, Cardozo's health continued to fail, and early in 1938 he died.

An Evaluation

Cardozo's judicial career was one of the most illustrious in the annals of American law. Justice Felix Frankfurter, in his book Of Law and Men, stated, "Barring only Mr. Justice Holmes, who was a seminal thinker in the law as well as vastly learned, no judge in his time was more deeply versed in the history of the common law or more resourceful in applying the living principles by which it has unfolded than Mr. Justice Cardozo."

U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings stated upon Cardozo's death: "His opinions spoke in tones of rare beauty. They might deal with things prosaic, but the language was that of a poet." Judge Learned Hand saw Cardozo as "a shy and sensitive man of great humility and compassion. It was a rare good fortune that brought to such eminence a man so reserved, so unassuming, so retiring, so gracious to high and low, and so serene."

Further Reading

Two works dealing directly with Cardozo and the law are Beryl H. Levy, Cardozo and Frontiers of Legal Thinking (1938; rev. ed. 1969), and George S. Hellman, Benjamin N. Cardozo: American Judge (1940). A well-documented work that praises Cardozo's decisions supporting Congress is Walter F. Murphy, Congress and the Court: A Case Study in the American Political System (1962). There is a chapter on Cardozo by A. L. Kaufman in Allison Dunham and Philip B. Kurland, eds., Mr. Justice (rev. ed. 1964). See also Joseph P. Pollard, Mr. Justice Cardozo: A Liberal Mind in Action (1935).

Additional Sources

Pollard, Joseph P. (Joseph Percival), Mr. Justice Cardozo: a liberal mind in action, Buffalo, N.Y.: W.S. Hein, 1995.

Posner, Richard A., Cardozo: a study in reputation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

For more information on Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: May 24, 1870, New York, N.Y.
• Education: Columbia College, B.A., 1889; M.A., 1890; Columbia Law School, 1891
• Previous government service: justice, New York State Supreme Court, 1914; judge, New York State Court of Appeals, 1914–32, chief judge, New York State Court of Appeals, 1926–32
• Appointed by President Herbert Hoover Feb. 15, 1932; replaced Oliver Wendell Holmes, who retired
• Supreme Court term: confirmed by the Senate Feb. 24, 1932, by a voice vote; served until July 9, 1938
• Died: July 9, 1938, Port Chester, N.Y.

Benjamin N. Cardozo was only the second Jew to be appointed to the Supreme Court. He served on the Court with the first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis.

Benjamin Cardozo was the youngest son of Albert and Rebecca Washington Cardozo, whose ancestors had settled in New York in the 1850s. He was a very bright child and entered Columbia University at age 15, graduating with honors four years later. In 1891, he began to practice law in New York City. Later, he served as a judge of the New York Supreme Court and the New York Court of Appeals.

As a New York State judge, Cardozo achieved a national reputation for his wise decisions and exemplary legal reasoning, which emphasized the effects of law on the lives of people. Cardozo opposed an overemphasis on precedent and tradition as constricting, too formal, and too likely to cause injustice by preventing constitutional changes to fit changing times.

Justice Cardozo served only six years on the U.S. Supreme Court. During this brief period, however, he established the doctrine of “selective incorporation” to guide the Court's use of the 14th Amendment to apply federal Bill of Rights provisions to the states. Cardozo stated this position in Palko v. Connecticut (1937). He wrote that to be “incorporated” under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, a provision of the Bill of Rights must be “fundamental”; that is, it must be a right without which “neither liberty nor justice would exist,” and the right “must be implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”

Cardozo recommended a case-by-case application of the 14th Amendment to use one or more parts of the Bill of Rights to limit the power of a state government and protect individual rights. This position was opposed by Justice Hugo Black, who wanted “total incorporation” of the Bill of Rights. Cardozo's position has prevailed, and the Court uses it today.

See also Incorporation doctrine; Palko v. Connecticut

Sources

• Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921).
• Andrew L. Kaufman, Cardozo (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
• Richard A. Posner, Cardozo: A Study in Reputation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)

(1870-1938), lawyer and associate justice, U.S. Supreme Court. Born in New York, Cardozo attended Columbia College and Law School but left without taking a law degree. He pursued in essence the calling of a barrister, that is, serving as counsel to other lawyers. He soon gained a reputation as a "lawyer's lawyer," especially in complicated commercial cases.

President William Howard Taft offered Cardozo a federal district judgeship, but Cardozo was supporting his two sisters and declined because of the meager salary. In 1913, however, reformers secured his election as a judge on the Supreme Court of New York, the lowest court in the state system. Within six weeks Governor Martin Glynn named him to the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals, on which he served for the next sixteen years, the last six as chief judge.

The "lawyer's lawyer" soon became the "judge's judge," and he made the Court of Appeals the second most distinguished tribunal in the land. Especially in commercial law, Cardozo's opinions carried great weight in New York and throughout the country. His decision in the landmark case of McPherson v. Buick Motor Co. (1916) changed the very nature of product liability law. Abolishing the old rule of privity, by which only those with a direct contractual relationship to the manufacturer could sue on a defective product, Cardozo made manufacturers directly liable to the consumer.

If lawyers and judges appreciated his legal skills, scholars esteemed his insights into forces that affected both judging and the law. Legal realists argued that a variety of nonlegal matters determined judicial decision making, an idea heretical to those who believed that judges did no more than proclaim established legal truths. In his classic Yale lectures, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921), Cardozo explicitly declared that many factors influenced how judges decided cases. He also argued that rules of law should be judged not by their antiquity or logic but by the extent to which they contributed to society's welfare.

On the retirement of Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1932, President Herbert Hoover was besieged with demands that he name Cardozo to the Supreme Court. With two New Yorkers--Charles Evans Hughes and Harlan Fiske Stone--already on the bench, Hoover feared that a third would create a geographical imbalance. Senator William Borah of Idaho calmed the president's fears; Cardozo, he said, belonged to Idaho as much as to New York.

On the bench Cardozo joined the liberal bloc of Louis D. Brandeis and Stone. In his six terms he showed promise of becoming one of the Court's great justices, but he died before he could leave a significant corpus of opinions. One decision, however, Palko v. Connecticut (1937), determined the debate over the application of the Bill of Rights to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. Cardozo argued that not all the guarantees of the first eight amendments applied to the states, only those that constituted "the very essence of a scheme of ordered liberty." This left it in the hands of judges to decide which rights fit the definition and which do not. In the 1940s, Justice Felix Frankfurter successfully carried on Cardozo's call for selective incorporation over Justice Hugo Black's demand for total incorporation.

Bibliography:

Beryl H. Levy, Cardozo and the Frontiers of Legal Thinking (1969).

Author:

Melvin I. Urofsky

See also Supreme Court.

(kärdō'zō) , 1870–1938, American jurist, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1932–38), b. New York City. Educated at Columbia Univ., he practiced law until he was elected (1913) to the New York supreme court. Cardozo was then appointed (1914) to the court of appeals, elected (1917) for a 14-year term, and elected (1927) chief judge of the court, which, largely through his influence, gained international fame. He was prominent in the efforts of the American Law Institute to restate and simplify the law, and he advocated a permanent agency to function between the courts and legislatures to aid in framing effective legislation. Of Sephardic background, he was active in a number of Jewish movements. He was appointed (1932) by President Herbert Hoover to the Supreme Court to succeed Oliver Wendell Holmes. Cardozo was one of the foremost spokesmen on sociological jurisprudence, and his views on the relation of law to social change made him one of the most influential of U.S. judges. With Justices Louis D. Brandeis and Harlan F. Stone, he voted to uphold much early New Deal legislation, dissenting from the majority opinion. Cardozo expounded his philosophy of law and the judicial process in three classics of jurisprudence: The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921), The Growth of the Law (1924), and The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928). He also wrote Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses (1931).

Bibliography

See the selection of his writings edited by M. E. Hall (1947); biographies by J. P. Pollard (1935, repr. 1970) and A. L. Kaufman (1998); studies by B. H. Levy (rev. ed. 1969) and W. C. Cunningham (1972).

Benjamin Nathan Cardozo was a New York state court judge, an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, and an influential legal scholar.

Cardozo was born May 24, 1870, in New York City, the youngest son in a family of six children. His parents were descendants of Portuguese and Spanish Jews who had settled in New York before the Revolutionary War. His father, Albert Cardozo, was a trial court judge who was forced to resign his seat because of allegations, which were never proved, of improper conduct involving the then corrupt New York City government. Cardozo was tutored during his early life by well known clergyman and teacher Horatio Alger and entered Columbia College at the age of fifteen. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1889 and a master's degree in 1890, then enrolled at Columbia Law School. He was granted admission to the New York state bar in 1891 without having received his law degree.

After completing his legal training and passing the bar examination, Cardozo began practicing appellate law with his brother. He soon became a prominent practitioner in his own right in the fields of corporate and commercial law. He often acted as consultant to other law firms, writing appeal briefs for other lawyers and appearing frequently before the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court. His extensive appellate experience led him to write his first book, Jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York, published in 1903. In addition, judges often appointed him to act as referee in complicated matters of commercial law, one of his areas of specialty.

In 1913, after twenty-three years in private practice, Cardozo was nominated and elected as a judge on the New York Supreme Court, the state's trial-level bench. Only six weeks later, he was designated to serve temporarily as an associate judge on the Court of Appeals. He remained a temporary judge of the Court of Appeals until 1917, when he was appointed to fill a vacant and permanent seat, and in 1926 he was elected chief judge.

During his tenure on the Court of Appeals, Cardozo made his mark as an influential and celebrated jurist and moved the New York court to the forefront of the nation's state courts. With respect to tort law, the court under Cardozo greatly expanded the protection offered to individuals injured by the negligence of others. In MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co., 217 N.Y. 382, 111 N.E. 1050 (1916), perhaps Cardozo's most influential tort opinion, the court held Buick liable for the negligent construction of a defective wheel that injured a purchaser who had bought the car not from Buick but from an automobile dealer. Cardozo's decision to look beyond the contractual relationship between the buyer and seller to the manufacturer for redress helped lay the groundwork for the development of product liability, now a common feature of the law, which allows for recovery for injuries even if the consumer had no contractual relationship with the manufacturer. But Cardozo was also willing to impose some commonsense limits on tort liability. In the classic decision Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad, 248 N.Y. 339, 162 N.E. 99 (1928), he authored the majority opinion establishing that a person can be held negligent only for a harm or injury that is foreseeable and not for every injury that follows from the negligence. As Cardozo put it, "[T]he orbit of the danger as disclosed to the eye of reasonable vigilance would be the orbit of duty."

Cardozo's influence was also strongly felt in the law of contracts. He wrote the majority opinion in Wood v. Duff-Gordon, 222 N.Y. 88, 118 N.E. 214 (1917), perhaps his best known and most widely quoted decision concerning the implied elements of a contract. In Wood and his other contract law decisions, Cardozo made clear his views that, whenever possible, courts should attempt to instill fairness in an ambiguous contract by analyzing and interpreting its implicit terms to cover situations that the parties may not have provided for explicitly.

In 1932, when ninety-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court, politicians, lawyers, and legal scholars publicly campaigned for Cardozo to succeed him. President Herbert Hoover, though impressed with Cardozo's credentials and intellect, was initially lukewarm about nominating him to the Court. Two other New Yorkers, Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes and Justice Harlan F. Stone, were already on the Court and others in Hoover's administration were concerned about appointing a second Jewish justice to serve in addition to Justice Louis D. Brandeis. After Stone offered his resignation (which was not accepted) to make room for Cardozo, Hoover was eventually persuaded to ignore the politics of geography and anti-Semitism and named Cardozo to the Court. On February 24, 1932, Cardozo was confirmed unanimously by a voice vote of the Senate, though he was said to be reluctant to leave his family and friends in New York and move to Washington, D.C., to accept the seat.

Though he served on the Court for only six years, Cardozo authored a number of significant decisions. He authored the majority opinion in the civil rights case Nixon v. Condon, 286 U.S. 73, 52 S. Ct. 484, 76 L. Ed. 984 (1932). Condon held that a resolution by a state party executive committee, under purported authority of a Texas statute (Vernon's Ann. Civ. St. Tex. art. 3107), which excluded blacks from primary elections, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Cardozo, for the most part, supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal legislation, writing the majority opinions in Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619, 57 S. Ct. 904, 81 L. Ed. 307 (1937), and Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, 301 U.S. 548, 57 S. Ct. 883, 81 L. Ed. 1279 (1937), which upheld the constitutionality of the unemployment compensation (Social Security Act §901-910, 42 U.S.C.A. §1101-1110) and old-age benefits programs (Social Security Act §201 et seq., 42 U.S.C.A. §401 et seq.) of the Social Security Act of 1935. Cardozo also authored a number of significant criminal law decisions while on the Court, including Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 58 S. Ct. 149, 82 L. Ed. 288 (1937). In Palko, the Court held that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution did not require that the Double Jeopardy Clause contained in the Fifth Amendment be applied to the states. Cardozo favored a "selective incorporation" approach to the Fourteenth Amendment, writing that only select protections of the first eight amendments that "represented the very essence of a scheme of ordered liberty, … principles of justice so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked fundamental," should be imposed upon the states. Palko represented the beginning of the Supreme Court's long struggle to formulate a test for applying the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as a limit on states' powers.

Cardozo, though remembered for his majority opinions, was not afraid to disagree with the majority and wrote some equally significant and stirring dissents while on the Court. In Carter v. Carter Coal Co., 298 U.S. 238, 56 S. Ct. 855, 80 L. Ed. 1160 (1936), one of many cases arising out of constitutional challenges to Roosevelt's New Deal legislation, the Court in a 6-3 vote struck down the 1935 Bituminous Coal Conservation Act (15 U.S.C.A. §§801-827), which authorized fixed prices to help stabilize the coal industry. Cardozo maintained that the law was constitutional and necessary to combat the economic problems created by the Great Depression. He wrote that "[a]fter making every allowance for differen[ces] of opinion as to the most efficient cure, the student of the subject is confronted with the indisputable truth that there are ills to be corrected, and ills that had a direct relation to the maintenance of commerce among the states…. An evil existing, and also the power to correct it, the lawmakers were at liberty to use their own discretion in the selection of the means."

Cardozo's body of legal scholarship is not limited to the many important judicial opinions he authored as a state court judge and U.S. Supreme Court justice. He also wrote a number of books which have become classics of legal thought and judicial philosophy. His lectures on the decision-making process that he delivered at Yale Law School and Columbia University early in his career were published in 1921 as a group of essays in The Nature of the Judicial Process, which is still widely used as a textbook for first-year law students. He also wrote The Growth of the Law (1924), The Paradox of Legal Science (1928), and Law and Literature (1931). In all his books, Cardozo sought to define the difficult issues faced by a judge in deciding cases, as well as his beliefs about how the entire legal system could function most effectively.

Cardozo, who never married and remained close to his family throughout his life, was a shy and reclusive man described in one book about the history of the Court as "the hermit philosopher." He remained on the Supreme Court until 1938 when he died of heart trouble at the age of sixty-eight. He is buried in the Cardozo family plot in the cemetery of Shearith Israel congregation at Cypress Hills, Long Island.

Quotes:

"We are what we believe we are"

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