Law and Literature, Who Could Ask For Anything More?

Today I continue with the Cardozo love. I've been reading some of his majority opinions and there's something about them that just energizes me. I feel priviliged to be reading them, I feel priviliged to be entering his field, priviliged to live in the country that he served for the entire duration of his short life. Is that too much? I kind of took the easy route reading Posner's relatively short biography (although it's more of a literary analysis of his career), but I think I'm going to have to pick up Kaufman's 744-page behemoth because of my budding obsession.

Reading his opinions makes me think that I haven't ventured too far from my English-major roots. Judges are writers, just incredibly powerful ones. You could say with certainty that Shakespeare changed the world by writing; we're all aware of his plays, they've become a part of our universal subconscious (helped along by the fact that he borrowed liberally from archetypes that were already well settled there). Judge Cardozo also changed the world by writing, except that most of us don't even know that our world's been changed. Even some of the judges that sat with Cardozo didn't know the extent to which he was rocking the legal world. When you can make such a signifcant difference with little more than a reversal of traditional word-order that's some serious writing ability. The lesson I'm taking away from this is that a pocket full of rhetoric will take you far.

Side-note: I'm doing much better taking a biographical approach to studying the law; it's taking me much longer to slog through all these black-letter-centric primers.