SOURCE: "The Styles of Mr. Justice Cardozo," in Life, Law and Letters: Essays and Sketches, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1979, pp. 47-58.

In the following essay, Auchincloss praises Cardozo's writings for their literary qualities, using examples from his legal opinions to illustrate his various methods of decision making and his different prose styles.

When I went to the University of Virginia Law School in the fall of 1938, I was determined to turn my back forever on the world of letters. I had failed—I had decided grimly—because my first novel, written during my junior year at Yale, had been rejected by Scribner's. It was thus ordained, I reasoned with the violence of youth, that I should never qualify for the exotic world of art and must resign myself to a more mundane profession. Although I thought I had been humbled, there was still a note of then unconscious condescension...