CARDOZO, BENJAMIN NATHAN

born May 24, 1870, New York City died July 9, 1938, Port Chester, N.Y., U.S. American jurist, a creative common-law judge and legal essayist who influenced the trend in U.S. appellate judging toward greater involvement with public policy and consequent modernization of legal principles. Generally a liberal, he was less concerned with ideology than with the nature of the judicial process itself; largely for this reason, his importance, while universally conceded, is difficult to fix precisely. Although he was esteemed for his service as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court (193238), he was probably more significant for his work on the highest state tribunal in New York, the Court of Appeals (191432; chief judge from 1926). A member of a distinguished Sephardic Jewish family, Cardozo enjoyed an unblemished personal reputation, although his father, Albert Jacob Cardozo, a New York Supreme Court justice with Tammany Hall connections, had resigned in 1872 under threat of impeachment. Admitted to the New York bar in 1891, Benjamin Cardozo was highly successful as a courtroom lawyer despite his mild, reserved manner. Elected to the state Supreme Court as a reform candidate in 1913, he was quickly promoted to the Court of Appeals. During his tenure, the quality of this appellate bench was thought by many to exceed that of the U.S. Supreme Court. In MacPherson v. Buick Motor Company (1916), Cardozo announced a doctrine that was later adopted elsewhere in the United States and in Great Britain: an implied warranty of safety exists between a manufacturer and a private purchaser, despite intermediate ownership of the product by a retail dealer. After the resignation (Jan. 12, 1932) of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, President Herbert Hoover appointed Cardozo to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the New Deal period under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Cardozo usually was bracketed with the liberally inclined Justices Louis D. Brandeis and Harlan Fiske Stone. He wrote a majority opinion for Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619, and other Social Security cases (1937), upholding the federal Social Security program on the basis of the general welfare provision of the Constitution (Article I, section 8). In Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319 (1937), a criminal case involving a claim of double jeopardy, he held that the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) to the Constitution imposed on the states only those provisions of the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments, 1791) that were of the very essence of a scheme of ordered liberty. Although it offered a minimum of guidance and may have encouraged much more constitutional litigation than would a specific standard, this test was retained by the court through the 1960s. In 1969, however, the Palko ruling was reversed by the court (Benton v. Maryland), which held that the rule against double jeopardy was so fundamental to justice as to be a requirement of due process of law.