SOURCE: "The Behavior of Judges," in The Nation (New York), Vol. CXIV, No. 2959, March 22, 1922, pp. 347-48.

In the following essay on The Nature of the Judicial Process, Powell comments on Cardozo's belief that judges too often allow personal feelings and experience to inform their decisions.

Those who brought the Tables of Stone from Mount Sinai were not the last to thrust the lawgiver behind the mask of myth or of abstract formula. Unthinkers still assure us that ours is a government of laws and not of men, rejecting as unholy the emendation that it is a government of lawyers and not of men. Judges, they say, do but passively apply what the law in its wisdom reveals to them—or to five out of nine of them. Yet there have long been skeptics. Two hundred and four years ago Bishop Hoadley dared to say that "whoever hath an...