Cardozo's Share

"I do not know how it will end," Benjamin Nathan Cardozo wrote in 1933. "I know that it has been an interesting time to live in, an interesting time in which to do my little share in translating into law the social and economic forces that clamor for expression." Having lived his time and done his share, as member and Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals and as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, he died last week at 68, of a diseased heart.

From the day in 1891 when he first presented himself, shy and hesitant, at the Manhattan bar, the law was his life. But he did not hold it in arid reverence. "The judicial process," he wrote, "is one of compromise between paradoxes, between certainty and uncertainty. . . ." Because his learning was great and his mind keen, he found his way cleanly through legal paradoxes. In his Supreme Court majority opinion upholding the Social Security Act last year, he stated the essence of the philosophy which made him "a judicial evolutionist": "Needs that were narrow or parochial a century ago may be interwoven in our day with the well-being of the nation. What is criticial or urgent changes with the times."

That a majority of the Court at last accepted this view was due in good measure to Justice Cardozo. His studied, richly phrased opinions did much to broaden the interpretation of the Constitution so that Congress now may legislate within vastly widened bounds for what it considers the general good. With the balance of the Court now strongly "liberal," Franklin Roosevelt will lose no advantage in Cardozo's passing, save that to replace him adequately, the President must find not only another "liberal" but a "judicial evolutionist" of rare distinction.

The Cardozos, a family of Sephardic Jews moved from London to New York city in 1752, founded there a line of merchants and lawyers. Their Benjamin was the second Jew appointed to the U. S. Supreme Court. (The first: Louis Dembitz Brandeis, at 81 the oldest Justice, who is reported thinking of retirement.) Unmarried, Benjamin Cardozo was much alone after the death in 1929 of his devoted and retiring sister, Nellie. Last December his heart forced him to leave the bench. Last April he went to the home of State Supreme Court Judge Irving Lehman (brother of New York's Governor) at Port Chester, N. Y. On his last day there, flowers came from two other old friends: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

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