Adventures and Insights I had many other adventures, including some wonderful experiences. The first thing that I did when I started work on my book was to interview people who had known Cardozo and were still around. Learned Hand and Felix Frankfurter were good friends of Cardozo, although not intimates, and they were still very much alive. Learned Hand in a few words gave me a concise insight into what a private man Cardozo was: "Very few have ever known what went on behind those blue eyes," is the way Hand put it. Another of those early interviews led me to a special moment. I shook hands with a man who had shaken hands with Abraham Lincoln. Charles Burlingham, dean of the New York bar and a major factor in Cardozo’s first election to the bench in 1913, was nearly 100 when I interviewed him—but he remembered everything. He told me that when he was five or six years old, he had gone to Washington with his father and had gotten to shake hands with Lincoln. A thrill for him, a thrill for me. Dealing with people who had relevant Cardozo material but were not prepared to make the documents public was an adventure in diplomacy. In the end all of them let me see the material and let me refer to it, but some would only let me identify the source as a "private collection." In that way, I was able to look at drafts of Cardozo opinions in the Supreme Court of the United States, including one important unpublished opinion, the one known extant letter from Cardozo to his sister Nellie that I have already mentioned, and some material relating to Cardozo’s financial affairs. I had an adventure of a very different kind when I went to the Federal Records Center in St. Louis to examine Justice Department records concerning Cardozo’s nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States. As I got out of a taxi in front of the Records Center I got caught on the door handle and ripped my trousers from stem to stern. But I had only eight hours to spend there and I was not going to waste time in repairing my trousers and my dignity. The librarians were most kind in averting their gaze. The Library of Congress’ wonderful collections of the papers of many of the justices provided a great deal of material for the chapters of my book on Cardozo’s years on the Supreme Court. Again it pays to take a long time to complete one’s work. When I started this project, the Harlan Fiske Stone Papers were closed to researchers, but along the way they were opened up. Stone was Cardozo’s closest companion on the Supreme Court, and their correspondence was very useful to me. The original materials in the Hughes Papers, on the other hand, which were open to the general public when I started my work, were later closed so that researchers must now view them on microfilm, and in a recatalogued fashion that appears to have effectively concealed some of the documents I earlier found. No one said that a researcher’s job was easy. The Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa, also recatalogued and renumbered the collection after I had done my research so that anyone who tries to use my citations is not going to get a lot of help from me. "Cardozo’s enduring importance arises out of his approach to judging. He was the first modern judge to tell us how he decided cases, how he made law, and, by implication, how others should do so. He declared his views in The Nature of the Judicial Process, a group of lectures delivered and published in 1921, and exemplified them in his judicial opinions. Both his views and his example influenced other judges. He gave us a model for judging that emphasized both its creative possibilities and its limits. His description of those possibilities and limits remains influential and controversial today. Even though contemporary society, which forms a modern judge’s frame of reference, has changed from Cardozo’s day, and even though many judges now give less heed to institutional considerations than Cardozo gave, most judges still go about the job of deciding cases within the framework that Cardozo described." From Cardozo, p.200 In all the years that I had worked on the book I had had no sense of what Cardozo sounded like. People had described his speaking voice to me, but in ways that left me with no sense of why he was described as a captivating speaker. A medium voice with a slight tremor in it were the terms I most often heard. Not a description of a captivating speaker. Near the end of my work one of the librarians at Harvard Law School, who knew I was looking for a reproduction of his voice, saw that the Library of Congress had recently acquired a tape that included remarks by Cardozo at a celebratory Columbia dinner. When I finally got a copy made and listened to it, I was blown away. I might have been listening to William Jennings Bryan himself. Cardozo was an orator, in the style of the 19th century. In one minute, I had learned why he was a captivating speaker, and I understood a good deal more about his success at the bar. I also ended up rewriting portions of the book. Cardozo’s enduring fame, however, turned more on the written word than on the spoken word. Here are a few of his many sentences that belong in legal writing’s Hall of Fame: "The prisoner is to go free because the constable has blundered." "Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances." "Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it." "The timorous may stay at home." "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." "The assault upon the citadel of privity is proceeding in these days apace." "One who is a martyr to a principle. . . does not prove by his martyrdom that he has kept within the law." by Andrew L. Kaufman ’54, Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law. A faculty member since 1966, Kaufman teaches courses on commercial law, constitutional law, and the legal profession.