From Library Journal
Early in his judicial career, Benjamin Cardozo, who would become a U.S. Supreme Court justice, established values for judicial decisions. He believed that judges can assess the social environment when precedent or philosophical positions do not provide for a clear decision. Polenberg (American history, Cornell Univ.) examines Cardozo's legal decision-making when he was a judge of the New York State Court of Appeals and a Supreme Court justice. Cardozo's decisions on cases ranging from negligence suits to major U.S. constitutional issues regarding the New Deal were tempered by his moral convictions and early experiences as well as by inherent uncertainties within the legal process. Polenberg shows that Cardozo was generally hospitable to government power in economic issues and usually upheld government authority in cases involving the rights of criminal defendants. The author provides loose connections between Cardozo's personal values and the justice's decision-making. However, general readers and scholars will gain a broader understanding of Cardozo as a jurist. For academic and larger public libraries.?Steven Puro, St. Louis Univ.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Jeffrey Rosen
In The World of Benjamin Cardozo, an entertaining contribution to the literature of Cardozo revisionism, Richard Polenberg, who teaches American history at Cornell, combines biographical exploration with a reconstruction of the facts of some of Cardozo's most salacious cases.
