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34 Yale J.L. & Human. 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/yallh34 and id is 1 raw text is: 











Introduction: The Nature of the Judicial

Process at 100*


Charles   L. Barzun  and  John  C.  P. Goldberg

  This special issue of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities contains
papers presented at a March 2022 conference at Yale Law School  marking
the centenary of the publication of Benjamin Cardozo's The Nature of the
Judicial Process. (The pandemic foiled our efforts to time these events more
precisely.) One of us (Barzun) came  up with the idea, and the two of us,
together with Daniel Markovits, Benjamin   Zipursky, and Konstanze  von
Schutz, planned the event and this volume. We  can think of no more  apt
publisher for the conference papers  than the Yale Journal  of Law  and
Humanities.  As a person of letters and science with both pre-modern and
modern  sensibilities, as someone both of and not of this world, and as a
jurist who was unsentimental yet devoted to the cause of human dignity and
welfare, Cardozo approached  the law first and foremost as a humanist.1 The
papers here collected-which  range from the historical to the philosophical
to the literary-are offered in the same spirit.
  One  may  ask whether  the hundredth anniversary of the publication of
Cardozo's  book  is an occasion  worth  marking.  Judge Richard  Posner
observed  in his contribution to the centennial issue of the Harvard Law
Review  that because a journal has no natural lifespan, the fact that it is 100
years old should interest only people who have a superstitious veneration
for round numbers.2 A book's  publication date may have an even weaker
claim for recognition since it does not even give birth to an institution with
a lifespan at all, natural or otherwise.
  Nor  does  Cardozo's  book  obviously  cry  out for special treatment.
Delivered as a set of four lectures in 1921, The Nature of the Judicial of the
Process   is a  somewhat   meandering   set  of reflections on  judicial
decisionmaking, filled with long sentences and even longer quotations from


Participants in the conference included those mentioned in this introduction, as well as Richard Brooks,
Abbe Gluck, Robert Post, Rebecca Roiphe, and Scott Shapiro.
  1. See ANDREw L. KAUFMAN, CARDOZO (1998); John C. P. Goldberg, Book Review: The Life of the
Law, 51 STAN. L. REV. 1419 (1998) (discussing how Cardozo combined profound detachment from the
world with a deep understanding of it and attempted to fashion and apply law in a way that was both
rule-bound yet responsive to social norms).
  2. Richard A. Posner, The Decline of Law as an Autonomous Discipline: 1962-1987, 100 HARV. L.
REV. 761 (1987).


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