Benjamin N. Cardozo

His father sat on New York's Supreme Court until an Erie Railway corruption scandal forced his resignation in 1868 — a public disgrace the son spent his career quietly living down. Their mother died while Benjamin and his twin sister Emily were still children, and an eleven-years-older sister, Nell, raised them; one of his boyhood tutors was Horatio Alger, then a washed-up minister making a living teaching rich men's sons. Cardozo graduated Columbia at nineteen, left law school without finishing his degree, and passed the bar in 1891 anyway. He spent the next 22 years as an appellate lawyer's lawyer, the kind other attorneys hired to argue their hardest cases, largely unknown outside the profession.

New York elected him to its Supreme Court in 1913 and promoted him to the Court of Appeals within weeks; he became Chief Judge in 1927. From that bench he rewrote the law schools still teach: MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. made manufacturers liable to consumers who never bought from them directly, and Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad turned a freak accident on a train platform into the definition of what a defendant owes a stranger. Herbert Hoover, wary of putting two New Yorkers and a second Jewish justice on the same bench, nominated him to the Supreme Court anyway in February 1932 after the legal establishment insisted there was no one better. The Senate confirmed him in nine days.

Of the six Cardozo children, only Emily married, and she had no children; Benjamin never did, and when asked why, he said simply that he could never give Nell second place in his life. He lived with her until her death in 1929, three years before Hoover's nomination reached him, and never really recovered the ordinary domestic life other justices had. On a court built for combative men, Cardozo was famous for the opposite — Learned Hand called what set him apart not his learning or his industry but a kind of purity. Behind that reputation for gentleness sat a family name he had spent forty years quietly rehabilitating, one opinion at a time, after his father's scandal.

A heart attack in late 1937 and a stroke in early 1938 ended his six years on the Court; he died July 9, 1938, at 68, in Port Chester, New York. His opinions kept working after he stopped writing them — Palko v. Connecticut supplied the phrase later courts used to decide which rights the Constitution protects against the states, and MacPherson remains the starting point for every American products-liability class. Cardozo School of Law, founded at Yeshiva University in 1976, carries his name into a fourth generation of students who mostly know him only as a syllabus heading, not as the son of a disgraced judge who made the family name safe to use again.

Benjamin N. Cardozo's life against the full span of the corpus.

• MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. case
  Ended the requirement that a buyer sue only the seller who sold them a defective product 1916
• Meinhard v. Salmon case
  Defined fiduciary duty as the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive 1928
• Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. case
  The foundational American case on the limits of negligence liability 1928
• The Nature of the Judicial Process book
  His Storrs Lectures at Yale, still assigned in law schools 1921
• Steward Machine Co. v. Davis case
  Upheld Social Security and unemployment compensation as constitutional 1937
• Palko v. Connecticut case
  Supplied the ordered liberty test for incorporating rights against the states 1937

• 1889 aged ~19 Graduates Columbia University at 19
• 1891 aged ~21 Passes the New York bar without finishing his law degree
• February 1914 aged 43 Designated to the New York Court of Appeals Reportedly the first Jewish judge to sit on the court.
• 1916 aged ~46 Writes MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co.
• 1927 aged ~57 Becomes Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals
• 1929 aged ~59 His sister Nell, who raised him, dies
• February 24, 1932 aged 61 Senate confirms him to the U.S. Supreme Court Nominated nine days earlier by Herbert Hoover to succeed Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
• 1937 aged ~67 Suffers a heart attack, then a stroke months later
• July 9, 1938 aged 68 Dies in Port Chester, New York, age 68

• Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 1841–1935
  Justice whose pragmatic jurisprudence and free-speech opinions deeply influenced American law. succeeded on the Supreme Court
• Louis Brandeis 1856–1941
  Justice and reform lawyer who advanced privacy, free speech, and progressive regulation. closest ally on the bench
• Learned Hand 1872–1961
  Federal judge whose widely cited opinions on free speech, negligence, and judicial restraint profoundly influenced American law. eulogized him
• Emma Lazarus 1849–1887
  Poet whose sonnet The New Colossus gave the Statue of Liberty its meaning as a refuge for immigrants. distant cousin
• Herbert Hoover 1874–1964
  Engineer and relief administrator whose presidency was consumed by the onset of the Great Depression. nominated him to the Court