Benjamin N. Cardozo

A trustee is held to something stricter than the morals of the market place. Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Membership in the bar is a privilege burdened with conditions.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Consequences cannot alter statutes, but may help to fix their meaning.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

The defendant styles herself "a creator of fashions." Her favor helps a sale. Manufacturers of dresses, millinery and like articles are glad to pay for a certificate of her approval. The things which she designs, fabrics, parasols and what not, have a new value in the public mind when issued in her name. She employed the plaintiff to help her to turn this vogue into money.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

The law has outgrown its primitive stage of formalism when the precise word was the sovereign talisman, and every slip was fatal. It takes a broader view to-day. A promise may be lacking, and yet the whole writing may be "instinct with an obligation," imperfectly expressed. If that is so, there is a contract.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Danger invites rescue. … The wrongdoer may not have foreseen the coming of a deliverer. He is accountable as if he had.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Fulfillment may fall short of expectation. At least there has been gained a foothold from which occasion can be seized.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Inaction without more is not tantamount to choice.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Prophecy, however honest, is generally a poor substitute for experience.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Due process is a growth too sturdy to succumb to the infection of the least ingredient of error.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Of that freedom one may say that it is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances. Substitute statute for decision, and you shift the center of authority, but add no quota of inspired wisdom.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

The repetition of a catchword can hold analysis in fetters for fifty years or more.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

With traps and obstacles and hazards confronting us on every hand, only blindness or indifference will fail to turn in all humility, for guidance or for warning, to the study of examples.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Method is much, technique is much, but inspiration is even more.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

The judicial process is one of compromise, a compromise between paradoxes, between certainty and uncertainty, between the literalism that is the exaltation of the written word and the nihilism that is destructive of regularity and order.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

In truth, I am nothing but a plodding mediocrity — please observe, a plodding mediocrity — for a mere mediocrity does not go very far, but a plodding one gets quite a distance. There is joy in that success, and a distinction can come from courage, fidelity and industry.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

You will study the wisdom of the past, for in a wilderness of conflicting counsels, a trail has there been blazed. You will study the life of mankind, for this is the life you must order, and, to order with wisdom, must know. You will study the precepts of justice, for these are the truths that through you shall come to their hour of triumph. Here is the high emprise, the fine endeavor, the splendid possibility of achievement, to which I summon you and bid you welcome.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

There comes not seldom a crisis in the life of men, of nations, and of worlds, when the old forms seem ready to decay, and the old rules of action have lost their binding force. The evils of existing systems obscure the blessings that attend them; and, where reform is needed, the cry is raised for subversion.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

The great generalities of the constitution have a content and a significance that vary from age to age.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

It is well enough to say that we shall be consistent, but consistent with what? . . . The origins of the rule? The course and tendency of development? With logic or philosophy? With the fundamental conceptions of jurisprudence? All these loyalties are possible. All have sometimes prevailed.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

If you ask how he is to know when one interest outweighs another, I can only answer that he must get his knowledge just as the legislator gets it, from experience and study and reflection; in brief, from life itself.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

The judicial process, as was said at the outset of these lectures, is a process of search and comparison, and little else.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

I was much troubled in spirit, in my first years upon the bench, to find how trackless was the ocean on which I had embarked. I sought for certainty. I was oppressed and disheartened when I found that the quest for it was futile. I was trying to reach land, the solid land of fixed and settled rules, the paradise of a justice that would declare itself by tokens plainer and more commanding than its pale and glimmering reflections in my own vacillating mind and conscience.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

I sometimes think that we worry ourselves overmuch about the enduring consequences of our errors. They may work a little confusion for a time. In the end, they will be modified or corrected or their teachings ignored. The future takes care of such things. In the endless process of testing and retesting, there is a constant rejection of the dross, and a constant retention of whatever is pure and sound and fine.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Magic words and incantations are as fatal to our science as they are to any other. Methods, when classified and separated, acquire their true bearing and perspective as a means to an end, not as ends in themselves. We seek to find peace of mind in the word, the formula, the ritual. The hope is an illusion.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

I do not underrate the yearning for mechanical and formal tests. They are possible and useful in zones upon the legal sphere. The pain of choosing is the pain of marking off such zones from others. It is a pain we must endure, for uniformity of method will carry us upon the rocks. The curse of this fluidity, of an ever shifting approximation, is one the law must bear, or other curses yet more dreadful will be invited in exchange.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Code is followed by commentary, and commentary by revision, and thus the task is never done.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

The state in commissioning its judges has commanded them to judge, but neither in constitution nor in statute has it formulated a code to define the manner of their judging. The pressure of society invests new forms of conduct in the minds of the multitude with the sanction of moral obligation, and the same pressure working upon the mind of the judge invests them finally through his action with the sanction of the law.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

A judge is to give effect in general not to his own scale of values, but to the scale of values revealed to him in his readings of the social mind. … Objective tests may fail him, or may be confused as to bewilder. He must then look within himself.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

Liberty in the most literal sense is the negation of law for law is restraint, and the absence of restraint is anarchy. On the other hand, anarchy by destroying restraint would leave liberty the exclusive possession of the strong or the unscrupulous.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

What has once been settled by a precedent will not be unsettled overnight, for certainty and uniformity are gains not lightly sacrificed. Above all is this true when honest men have shaped their conduct on the faith of the pronouncement.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

They do things better with logarithms.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo

The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.

— Benjamin N. Cardozo