Source: https://enq.translatum.gr/wiki/Benjamin_N._Cardozo
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 10:05:40+00:00

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Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (24 May 1870 - 9 July 1938) was a long-time Justice of the Court of Appeals of New York, where his opinions included many declarations that would become famous in legal circles; he was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1932.
In re Rouss, 221 N.Y. 81, 84 (1917).
Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, 222 N.Y. 88, 118 N.E. 214 (1917). This opening paragraph has been debated among legal practitioners, some of whom take its tone to be a sly rebuke by Cardozo of a profession which he considered to have an exaggerated influence.
Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, 222 N.Y. 88, 118 N.E. 214 (1917).
Wagner v. International Railway Co., 232 N.Y. 13 (1926), setting forth the rescue doctrine which holds negligent parties liable not only for injury to the victim, but to those who attempt to rescue the victim.
Richard v. Credit Suisse, 242 N.Y. 346, 351 (1926).
Berkey v. Third Avenue Railway, 244 N.Y. 84, 94, 155 N.E. 58, 61 (1926). Sometimes misquoted as referring to "figures of speech" rather than metaphors, or with other minor variations.
Meinhard v. Salmon, 249 N.Y. 458, 164 N.E. 545 (1928), describing the fiduciary duties inherent in a partnership.
Woolford Realty Co., Inc., v. Rose, 286 U.S. 319, 330 (1932).
Baldwin v. Seelig, 294 U.S. 511, 523, (1935).
Yet it is indeed doubtful whether, in the history of mankind, a doctrine was ever taught more impracticable or more false to the principles it professes than this very doctrine of communism. In a world where self-interest is avowedly the ruling motive, it seeks to establish at once an all-reaching and all-controlling altruism. In a world where every man is pushing and fighting to outstrip his fellows, it would make him toil with like vigor for their common welfare. In a world where a man's activity is measured by the nearness of reward, it would hold up a prospective recompense as an equal stimulant to labor. ... In the future, when the remoteness of his reward shall have weakened the laborer's zeal, we shall be able to judge more fairly of the blessings that the communist offers.
I can look forward to no blissful prospect for a race of men that, under the dominion of the State, at the cost of all freedom of action, at the cost, indeed, of their own true selves, shall enjoy, if one will, a fair abundance of the material blessings of life. ... Into that prison of socialism, with broken enterprise and broken energy, as serfs under the mastery of the State, while human personality is preferred to unreasoning mechanism, mankind must hesitate to step.
There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals. All their lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them — inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions; and the resultant is an outlook on life, a conception of social needs. ... In this mental background every problem finds it setting. 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.
My analysis of the judicial process comes then to this, and little more: logic, and history, and custom, and utility, and the accepted standards of right conduct, are the forces which singly or in combination shape the progress of the law. Which of these forces dominate depends largely upon the comparative importance or value of the social interests that will be thereby promoted or impaired. ... The most fundamental social interest is that law shall be uniform and impartial. ... Uniformity ceases to be a good when it becomes uniformity of oppression.
I am ready to concede that the rule of adherence to precedent, though it ought not to be abandoned, ought to be in some degree relaxed. I think that when a rule, after it has been duly tested by experience, has been found to be inconsistent with the sense of justice or with the social welfare, there should be less hesitation in frank avowal and full abandonment. ... That court best serves the law which recognizes that the rules of law which grew up in a remote generation may, in the fullness of experience, be found to serve another generation badly, and which discards the old rule when it finds that another rule of law represents what should be according to the established and settled judgment of society.
We like to picture to ourselves the field of law as accurately mapped and plotted. We draw our little lines, and they are hardly down before we blur them. As in time and space, so here. Divisions are working hypotheses, adopted for convenience. ... So also the duty of a judge becomes itself a question of degree, and he is a useful judge or a poor one as he estimates the measure accurately or loosely. He must balance all his ingredients, his philosophy, his logic, his analogies, his history, his customs, his sense of right, and all the rest, and adding a little here and taking out a little there, must determine, as wisely as he can, which weight shall tip the scales.
It comes down to this. There are certain forms of conduct which at any given place and epoch are commonly accepted under the combined influence of reason, practice and tradition, as moral or immoral. ... Law accepts as the pattern of its justice the morality of the community whose conduct it assumes to regulate. In saying this, we are not to blind ourselves to the truth that uncertainty is far from banished. Morality is not merely different in different communities. Its level is not the same for all the component groups within the same community. A choice must still be made between one group standard and another. We have still to face the problem, at which one of these levels does the social pressure become strong enough to convert the moral norm into a jural one? All that we can say is that the line will be higher than the lowest level of moral principle and practice, and lower than the highest. The law will not hold the crowd to the morality of saints and seers. It will follow, or strive to follow, the principle and practice of the men and women of the community whom the social mind would rank as intelligent and virtuous.
A judge is to give effect in general not to his own scale of values, but to the scale of values revealed to him in his readings of the social mind. ... Objective tests may fail him, or may be confused as to bewilder. He must then look within himself.
This page was last modified on 21 July 2008, at 21:59.
This article uses material from the English Wikiquote article "Benjamin N. Cardozo".

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