Cardozo, Benjamin

Abstract

Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (1870–1938) is, together with Oliver Wendell Holmes (whom he succeeded as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court) and Roscoe Pound, one of the maximum representatives of the anti-formalist school of thought described as “sociological jurisprudence” which was highly influential in North America in the early decades of the twentieth century. Cardozo’s protagonism in the juridical culture of his time is twofold: as a judge and as a legal theorist. The two are, in any event, facets that are intertwined. On the one hand, his rulings (recognized for being thoroughly adapted to the new needs of a society in a continual process of transformation) represent a genuine expression of his theoretical thinking. On the other hand, his extrajudicial writings were mediatized by the final aim of providing the reader with an analysis of the correct legal decision. Cardozo already advances the nucleus of his ideas in The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921), where he expresses his intention of revealing the methods that a judge follows in preparing his rulings, proposing a definite criterion for determining their content. He looks more deeply, however, into some of those questions in The Growth of the Law (1924) and in The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928), offering precise and articulated replies to problems that remained unanswered in that initial expression of his conception.