Introduction: The Nature of the Judicial Process at 100

Abstract

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 Schütz, 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. 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.” 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.