Cardozo for Holmes

Last week President Hoover appointed Chief Judge Benjamin Nathan Cardozo of New York's Court of Appeals to fill the Supreme Court vacancy made by the retirement of Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (TIME, Jan. 25). Senatorial Insurgents, Republicans and Demo-crats alike, unanimously applauded the choice. In making the appointment, which only a miracle could prevent the Senate from confirming, the President disregarded party and geographical distinctions. Judge Cardozo is a Democrat, although he has the support of both parties in his State, and will be the third New York member of the nation's highest tribunal. The others are Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and Associate Justice Harlan Fiske Stone.* The fact that the Hoover political family also contains two other New Yorkers, Secretaries Stimson and Mills, added to the apprehension of Judge Cardozo's friends lest he be deprived of the post. He has been mentioned for every vacancy that has occurred in the Supreme Court for years.

Brightest gem in his State's judicial crown, Judge Cardozo, a thin-nosed patrician descendant of Sephardic Jews, may be expected to bolster up the Court's fine Liberal-Conservative balance, which was jeopardized by Liberal Justice Holmes's retirement.

Ever since he was graduated from Columbia Law School 42 years ago, aged 19, Judge Cardozo has been an advocate of fluidity in the law. In 1914, month after he was elected to the State Supreme Court, he was appointed to the Court of Appeals. He has been there ever since. And although his father was one of the judicial triumvirate behind New York City's William M. ("Boss") Tweed, Judge Cardozo has kept his office aloof from politics.

In Manhattan he has an ugly house, which he shares with his sister and which he likes to joke about. He goes to a few concerts, but eschews exercise of any sort.

Excerpts from his legal philosophy, set down in his books and lectures: "Property, like liberty, though immune under the Constitution from destruction, is not immune from legislation essential for the common good. . . . Nothing is stable. All is fluid and changeable. ... I was much troubled in spirit in my first years on the bench to find out how trackless was the ocean on which I had embarked. I sought for certainty. I have become reconciled to the uncertainty, because I have grown to see it is inevitable."

President Henry U. Sims of the American Bar Association estimated the judicial worth of Judge Cardozo, on his 60th birthday, thus: "Probably no one has contributed so much as Chief Judge Cardozo, unless it be Dean Roscoe Pound, toward clarifying for the legal world the function of the judge in shaping and developing the Law."

* He will also be the second Jew. The other: Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis.

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