Frasi di Benjamin N. Cardozo

Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, 222 N.Y. 88, 91; 118 N.E. 214 (N.Y. 1917)
Judicial opinions
Contesto: 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.

Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)
Contesto: The reconciliation of the irreconcilable, the merger of antitheses, the synthesis of opposites, these are the great problems of the law... We have the claims of stability to be harmonized with those of progress. We are to reconcile liberty with equality, and both of them with order. The property rights of the individual we are to respect, yet we are not to press them to the point at which they threaten the welfare or the security of the many. We must preserve to justice its universal quality, and yet leave to it the capacity to be individual and particular.<!-- p. 4-5

Page 167
Other writings, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)
Contesto: I have spoken of the forces of which judges avowedly avail to shape the form and content of their judgments. Even these forces are seldom fully in consciousness. They lie so near the surface, however, that their existence and influence are not likely to be disclaimed. But the subject is not exhausted with the recognition of their power. Deep below consciousness are other forces, the likes and the dislikes, the predilections and the prejudices, the complex of instincts and emotions and habits and convictions, which make the man, whether he be litigant or judge.

Pages 12-13
Other writings, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)
Contesto: There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals. All their lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them — inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions; and the resultant is an outlook on life, a conception of social needs. … In this mental background every problem finds it setting. We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own.

Pages 67 – 68
Other writings, The Growth of the Law (1924)
Contesto: 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.

Baldwin v. Seelig http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/seelig.html, 294 U.S. 511, 523, (1935)
Judicial opinions
Contesto: Price security, we are told, is only a special form of sanitary security; the economic motive is secondary and subordinate; the state intervenes to make its inhabitants healthy, and not to make them rich. On that assumption we are asked to say that intervention will be upheld as a valid exercise by the state of its internal police power, though there is an incidental obstruction to commerce between one state and another. This would be to eat up the rule under the guise of an exception. Economic welfare is always related to health, for there can be no health if men are starving. Let such an exception be admitted, and all that a state will have to do in times of stress and strain is to say that its farmers and merchants and workmen must be protected against competition from without, lest they go upon the poor relief lists or perish altogether. To give entrance to that excuse would be to invite a speedy end of our national solidarity. The Constitution was framed under the dominion of a political philosophy less parochial in range. It was framed upon the theory that the peoples of the several states must sink or swim together, and that in the long run prosperity and salvation are in union and not division.

Lecture at Yale University Law School (1923) as quoted in The American Journal of International Law Vol. 29 (1935), p. 32
Other writings
Contesto: 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.

Pages 66 http://books.google.com/books?id=LGLuAAAAMAAJ&q=%22We+seek+to+find+peace+of+mind+in+the+word+the%22&pg=PA66#v=onepage – 67 http://books.google.com/books?id=LGLuAAAAMAAJ&q=%22formula+the+ritual+The+hope+is+an+illusion%22&pg=PA67#v=onepage
Other writings, The Growth of the Law (1924)
Contesto: 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.

Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)
Contesto: Our course of advance... is neither a straight line nor a curve. It is a series of dots and dashes. Progress comes per saltum, by successive compromises between extremes, compromises often … between "positivism and idealism". The notion that a jurist can dispense with any consideration as to what the law ought to be arises from the fiction that the law is a complete and closed system, and that judges and jurists are mere automata to record its will or phonographs to pronounce its provisions.

Berkey v. Third Avenue Railway, 244 N.Y. 84, 94, 155 N.E. 58, 61 (N.Y. 1926). Sometimes misquoted as referring to "figures of speech" rather than metaphors, or with other minor variations.
Judicial opinions
Contesto: The whole problem of the relation between parent and subsidiary corporations is one that is still enveloped in the mists of metaphor. Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it. We say at times that the corporate entity will be ignored when the parent corporation operates a business through a subsidiary which is characterized as an 'alias' or a 'dummy.'... Dominion may be so complete, interference so obtrusive, that by the general rules of agency the parent will be a principal and the subsidiary an agent.

Pages 67 – 68
Other writings, The Growth of the Law (1924)
Contesto: 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.

Pages 12-13
Other writings, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)
Contesto: There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals. All their lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them — inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions; and the resultant is an outlook on life, a conception of social needs. … In this mental background every problem finds it setting. We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own.

Excerpt from speech delivered at the 74th commencement of the Albany Law School on June 10, 1925, which is reproduced on a gigantic plaque on the west side (facing the setting sun, as if to say, "Go West, young man.") of the UC Berkeley School of Law's main building, Boalt Hall.
Other writings

Mr. Justice Holmes, 44 Harv. L. Rec. 682, 289 (1931)
Other writings

Roberts v. New York, 295 U.S. 264, 278 (1935)
Judicial opinions

p, 125
Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)

In re Rouss, 221 NY 81, 91 (N.Y. 1917)
Judicial opinions

As quoted in Nine Old Men (1936) by Drew Pearson and Robert Sharon Allen, p. 221
Other writings

p, 125
Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)

On types of judicial writing, in "Law and Literature" in Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses (1931), p. 10
Other writings

Page 112
Other writings, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)

Page 113
Other writings, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)

Ultramares Corp. v. Touche, 255 N.Y. 170, 179, 174 N.E. 441, 444 (N.Y. 1931)
Judicial opinions

Woolford Realty Co., Inc., v. Rose, 286 U.S. 319, 330 (1932)
Judicial opinions

Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)

Page 132
Other writings, The Growth of the Law (1924)

Pages 150-51
Other writings, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)

Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 327, (1937)
Judicial opinions

Commenting on the uncertainty of the law.
Other writings, The Paradoxes of Legal Science (1928)