Benjamin N. Cardozo

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Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (May 24, 1870 – July 9, 1938) was an American lawyer and jurist who served on the New York Court of Appeals from 1914 to 1932 and as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1932 until his death in 1938. Cardozo is remembered for his significant influence on the development of American common law in the 20th century, as well as for his philosophy and vivid prose style.

Born in New York City , Cardozo passed the bar in 1891 after attending Columbia Law School . He won an election to the New York Supreme Court in 1913 but was appointed to the New York Court of Appeals the following year. He won election as chief judge of that court in 1926. As chief judge, he wrote majority opinions in cases such as _Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. _

In 1932, President Herbert Hoover appointed Cardozo to the U.S. Supreme Court to succeed Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Cardozo served on the Court until his death in 1938 and formed part of the liberal bloc of justices known as the Three Musketeers . He wrote the Court's majority opinion in notable cases such as _Nixon v. Condon _ (1932) and _Steward Machine Co. v. Davis _ (1937).

Contents

• 1 Early life and family

  • 1.1 Education

• 2 Legal career

  • 2.1 Law practice

  • 2.2 New York Court of Appeals

  • 2.3 United States Supreme Court

  • 2.4 Honors

• 3 Personal life

  • 3.1 Ethnicity

• 4 Cases

• 5 Schools, organizations, buildings and ships named after Cardozo

• 6 Bibliography

• 7 See also

• 8 Notes

• 9 Further reading

• 10 External links

Early life and family

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Cardozo, the son of Rebecca Washington (née Nathan) and Albert Jacob Cardozo , was born in 1870 in New York City . Both Cardozo's maternal grandparents, Sara Seixas and Isaac Mendes Seixas Nathan, and his paternal grandparents, Ellen Hart and Michael H. Cardozo, were Western Sephardim of the Portuguese-Jewish community, and affiliated with Manhattan 's Congregation Shearith Israel . Cardozo had his bar mitzvah at Shearith Israel in June of 1883. Their ancestors had immigrated to the British colonies from London , England, before the American Revolution .

The family were descended from Jewish-origin New Christian conversos . They left the Iberian Peninsula for Holland during the Inquisition . There they returned to the practice of Judaism . Cardozo family tradition held that their marrano (New Christians who maintained crypto-Jewish practices in secrecy) ancestors were from Portugal , although Cardozo's ancestry has not been firmly traced to that country. But "Cardozo " (archaic spelling of Cardoso), "Seixas ", and "Mendes " are the Portuguese , rather than Castilian, spelling of those common Iberian surnames.

Benjamin Cardozo had a fraternal twin, his sister Emily. They had four other siblings, including an older sister Nell and older brother.

Benjamin was named for his uncle, Benjamin Nathan , a vice president of the New York Stock Exchange , who was murdered in 1870. The case was never solved. Among their many cousins, given their deep history in the US, was the poet Emma Lazarus . Other earlier relations include Francis Lewis Cardozo (1836–1903), Thomas Cardozo , and Henry Cardozo , free men of color of Charleston, South Carolina . Francis became a Presbyterian minister in New Haven, Connecticut , after education in Scotland, and was elected Secretary of State of South Carolina during the Reconstruction era. Later he worked as an educator in Washington, D.C., under a Republican administration.

Albert Cardozo , Benjamin Cardozo's father, was a judge on the Supreme Court of New York (the state's general trial court) until 1868. He was implicated in a judicial corruption scandal sparked by the Erie Railway takeover wars and was forced to resign. The scandal also led to the creation of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York . After leaving the court, the senior Cardozo practiced law for nearly two decades more until his death in 1885

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