Tracking Cardozo Writing a biography is an adventure. Along the way I encountered many mysteries relating to available Cardozo materials that needed to be solved. One was the story, often repeated, that Irving Lehman, chief judge of the Court of Appeals and Cardozo’s close friend, burned Cardozo’s papers after Cardozo’s death. The purported reasons were to carry out Cardozo’s instructions and to preserve his privacy. I discovered quite early that there were two events of destruction, the effect of which was to destroy a great deal of Cardozo’s professional papers and other people’s letters to him. Letters written by him of course remained in the files of his correspondents. When Cardozo was appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President Hoover in 1932 and was about to move to Washington, he returned to Felix Frankfurter a letter that Frankfurter had written many years before. Cardozo commented that he had saved Frankfurter’s letter from the flames to which he had consigned much of his papers. There was a second destruction of papers after Cardozo’s death, but Irving Lehman was not the destroyer, although he had been consulted. I had been told secondhand that the destruction was carried out by his executor, William Freese, and by Kate Tracy, the longtime nurse, house manager, and friend of the family. Shortly before I turned in the completed manuscript to the Harvard University Press in 1995, a memorandum from Mr. Freese stating that he had indeed destroyed the papers turned up in someone’s garage, and I learned of the discovery by being in the right place at the right time. There is a lot of luck in writing a biography. Another mystery related to Cardozo’s correspondence with his sister Nellie. He wrote her every day from Albany when the court was in session there. Nellie treasured that correspondence but it has disappeared. My guess is that Cardozo gathered it up after his sister’s death and either destroyed it immediately or burned it in the fire he set just before he went to Washington. But during my research I discovered that one letter did exist. Its owner was reluctant to let it out of her hands but thought that I should at least hear it so that I could refer to the nature of its contents in my book. And so she read it to me. I have made use of its contents, because it was a letter like no other in the collection of Cardozo correspondence that I have put together. It was the extravagant, loving, and humorous letter of a devoted brother to an ailing sister. Later, I obtained permission for the use I made of it. An unsolved mystery concerns the briefs and memorandaof Cardozo’s 23 years of private law practice. Cardozo preserved them and presented them to the St. John’s Law Library in 1932. By 1938, when inquiry was made by an earlier author who wrote a personal biography of Cardozo, the collection had been lost, and it has remained lost ever since. I therefore had to reconstruct his practice on my own as best as I could. That effort presents an interesting contrast between old-fashioned and modern technology. Working in the days before Lexis and Westlaw, there was one way to make a substantial reconstruction of a practice that was heavily appellate. That was to turn by hand the pages of the New York reports during the 23 years in which Cardozo was a private practitioner. That took a very long time—over a year, although I did not work on that project every minute of every day. A subsequent check on Lexis, conducted much later, took 45 minutes. Once I had the cases in hand, I was then able to locate most of the briefs and records in the appellate cases in which he appeared. Most of the records printed as appendices reproduced all or large portions of the trial transcript and so I was also able to get some sense of Cardozo’s trial court technique. An unexpected obstacle arose during my visit to the American Jewish Archives located at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Those archives contained many manuscript collections that provided a good deal of information about Cardozo’s youth and professional career. The librarians neglected to tell me when I made arrangements to use the collections that the time of my arrival would coincide with the beginning of a construction project. When I arrived, with my very pregnant research assistant, my wife, Linda, the manuscripts were all in boxes piled floor to ceiling in a room that must have been 50 yards long, 50 yards wide, and 20 feet high. But the librarians did not turn us away. They gave us a private room to work in—although it had neither a window nor air conditioning and it was a hot June—and allowed us to roam among the stacks of boxes looking for what we wanted. Three staff members also wandered with us helping us to find what we wanted in the maze of materials—identified only by the names on the boxes. There was no location map. Amazingly, we managed to find just about everything that we had come to see, including one crucial letter in which Cardozo expressed his views on race relations. Unfortunately, the whole letter was not there, and a diligent search through the entire collection at that time and during a subsequent visit failed to turn up the missing part of the letter. Indeed, on a later visit, I discovered that the library had attached a second half to the first part, but it was not the matching piece. In one of the wonderful moments in a researcher’s work, I discovered the missing part in another library 20 years later. "Although Cardozo treated his clerks well, he was not on intimate terms with any of them. He was a private man, and the age difference was too great. The talk was mostly of law and current events. No one asked him about personal matters, and he offered them little insight into that side of his life. Only his last clerk, Joe Rauh, got up enough nerve, when asked to stay a second year, to ask Cardozo to call him by his first name instead of Rauh or Mr. Rauh. Cardozo complied, yet it was hard for him to break the habit." From Cardozo, p.482 Yet another mystery involved a wonderful treasure trove. All the time I was working on the book there was a hidden source of information. Early on I learned that the judges of the New York Court of Appeals had the practice of having one of their number write a memorandum to the others in cases that they had determined initially to decide without publishing an opinion. Those memoranda were preserved in the files of the Court of Appeals. I inquired about their availability, and five successive chief judges replied that the memoranda had been written on the expectation of confidentiality and that the court had decided to preserve that expectation. Finally, near the end of my work, Chief Judge Sol Wachtler persuaded the court that it, in his words, should be helping and not hindering me. The court granted me access, on condition that I obtain its consent for the specific use I made of the materials. It then transferred the files to the State Archives. There were over 600 such Cardozo memoranda. They were written more informally than court opinions, and they added greatly to my knowledge about how Cardozo went about deciding cases. They demonstrated the collegiality of the court and the great care that Cardozo took regarding cases to be decided without an opinion. They also dispel any thought that the other judges simply followed Cardozo. There was a great deal of give and take, and Cardozo’s colleagues did not hesitate to reject his views when they disagreed. I should add that when I submitted my preliminary and final drafts to the court for its approval, Chief Judge Kaye did not just look at the specific marked places where I used the court’s memoranda. She read the half of the book that pertained to the Court of Appeals twice and made numerous comments and suggestions. A final mystery concerns my early and unknowing proximity to an important cache of Cardozo materials. Joseph Paley had been Cardozo’s long-time law clerk on the Court of Appeals. I interviewed him early in my work. He did not say that he had kept a large volume of material relating to his years of service. These papers surfaced only after Mr. Paley’s death when they were put on the market for sale. Some of them appeared to be materials that might well have been part of Cardozo’s estate. It would have been a disaster for my work if those papers had been sold piecemeal or if they had been sold and then disappeared into a private collection. With my strong urging, the libraries at Harvard, Columbia, and Cardozo Law Schools joined forces to seek the withdrawal of the papers from sale and eventually through the work of Columbia’s general counsel and Morris Cohen, then Harvard’s law librarian, the papers were purchased for retention by Cardozo Law School, with copies in the law libraries of the other two schools.