SOURCE: "About Books, More or Less: Courts and Crowds," in The New York Times Book Review, May 27, 1928, p. 4.

In the following essay on The Paradoxes of Legal Science, Strunsky discusses Cardozo's ideas about the creative function of the judicial process in terms of the American voting public's behavior and sentiments.

The presiding Judge of our New York State Court of Appeals confesses to the higher discontent which every good man brings to the practice of his profession. Judge Cardozo is not proof against the familiar belief that the grass in his neighbor's field is greener and the air on the other side of the creek is much more bracing. Why, he asks in The Paradoxes of Legal Science cannot I employ my rules of law with the same precision and certainty of results as the engineer with his logarithms and his stress and strain indexes? Why cannot I...