Benjamin Cardozo
Benjamin Cardozo
Benjamin Nathan Cardozowas 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. Cardozo served on the Supreme Court six years, from 1932 until his death in 1938. Many of his landmark decisions were delivered during his eighteen-year tenure on the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSupreme Court Justice
Date of Birth24 May 1870
CountryUnited States of America
Opinion has a significance proportioned to the sources that sustain it.
There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.
What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.
Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.
Justice, though due to the accused, is due the accuser also. The concept of fairness cannot be strained till it is narrowed to a filament. We are to keep our balance true.
Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances. Substitute statute for decision, and you shift the center of authority, but add no quota of inspired wisdom.
Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.
More truly characteristic of dissent is a dignity, an elevation, of mood and thought and phrase. Deep conviction and warm feeling are saying their last say with knowledge that the cause is lost. The voice of the majority may be that of force triumphant, content with the plaudits of the hour, and recking little of the morrow. The dissenter speaks to the future, and his voice is pitched to a key that will carry through the years.
History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
Law never is, but is always about to be.
As I search the archives of my memory I seem to discern six types or methods [of judicial writing] which divide themselves from one another with measurable distinctness. There is the type magisterial or imperative; the type laconic or sententious; the type conversational or homely; the type refined or artificial, smelling of the lamp, verging at times upon preciosity or euphuism; the demonstrative or persuasive; and finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the pastepot which are its implements and emblem.
The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
The Constitution was framed upon the theory that the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long run prosperity and salvation are in union and not division.
The final cause of law is the welfare of society.