Welcome Remarks at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Lecture – By Muhammad U. Faridi, President

By Muhammad U. Faridi
President, New York City Bar Association

The following remarks were delivered at the New York City Bar Association, where, on October 23, 2024, Judge Jed S. Rakoff, Senior Judge of the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, delivered the Benjamin N. Cardozo Lecture. A video of the program, including these welcome remarks and an introduction of Judge Rakoff by Judge Raymond Lohier of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, is here. More information on the City Bar’s Benjamin N. Cardozo Lecture Series is here. 

Good evening.  My name is Muhammad Faridi, and I am the association’s president.  My job tonight is easy.  It is not to introduce our esteemed lecturer for the evening, Judge Rakoff.  For that, we’ve brought in a heavy hitter.  That’s the job assigned to Judge Lohier from the Second Circuit.  You’ll hear from him shortly.  I, on the other hand, have been given just three simple tasks for this evening.

The first task is to welcome you all to the association.  We have so many luminaries of the bar in this Great Hall tonight, and it is too difficult of a task for me to call out each of your names this evening.  Thank you for being here.  Your presence here means a great deal to our association, and I know to Judge Rakoff.

My second task is to give some background on the Cardozo memorial lecture series.  The Cardozo lecture was established in 1941 to honor—and I’ll quote the report of the committee that established the lecture—Justice Cardozo’s “love for the law, passion for justice and sympathy for humanity.’’[1]  The late Edwin Patterson, who was the Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at Columbia University, wrote that one of Justice Cardozo’s most significant contributions to the law was his rare insight into its “moral values”: “his power to penetrate through a traditional aggregate of legal rules and precedents”; his power “to find an ethical justification, or lack [thereof]” in the rules; and “his judicial craftsmanship in either bending the tough legal rule to meet the requirements of ethical principle, or refusing to bend through fear of breaking some paramount value of the legal and political order….”[2]

Thus, it should come as no surprise to you that this lecture has previously been delivered by among the most distinguished members of our country’s judiciary: Supreme Court justices such as Earl Warren, William Brennan, and Ruth Bader Ginsberg; federal appellate judges such as Henry Friendly, Jon Newman, and Guido Calabresi; and federal district court judges such as Marvin Frankel and Jack Weinstein.  Even though the last lecture was in 2009, the lecture has been a cornerstone of our association’s commitment to fostering a thoughtful dialogue on the moral values of the law, and—consistent with that tradition—we could not think of a more fitting person to revive it this year.  We are lucky that the Yankees are not playing tonight, or else Judge Rakoff would have asked for a rain check.

We are fortunate that many of the prior Cardozo lectures have been published in legal periodicals.  If you have the time, I encourage you to peruse through them.  The most striking thing about these lectures is their consistency in giving an inclusive and equitable meaning to the tantalizingly vague phrases such as “equal protection” and “due process.”

I confess that I have not read every one of them, but I have read many. The ones that stand out to me include Chief Justice Earl Warren’s lecture in 1970, “All Men Are Created Equal.”  I have a feeling that if he was giving that lecture today, he would swap out “Men” with “People.”  He ended his lecture by stating: “It is not enough merely to open the courthouse doors to everyone.  The proceedings … must … be open on equal terms to all who enter; otherwise the word ‘justice’ is a sterile one which cannot command the respect we claim for it.”[3]  His was the era that gave us Brown,[4] Miranda,[5] Gideon,[6] Griswold,[7] Roe,[8] and so on and so forth.

The other lecture that stands out to me is Marian Wright Edelman’s “Leave No Child Behind,” which was delivered in 1992.  In that lecture, she debunked the popular myths of that era—some still popular today—about children from marginalized backgrounds, the poor, and racial and ethnic minorities.  And she stated: “As racial strife and hate … invade our land again, strong counter voices and actions must answer those who scratch and tear open, rather than heal, our ever tender racial wounds.”[9]  She spoke like a poet and a prophet.

And the last one that stands out is the lecture by Judge Weinstein that I had the privilege of attending here in this Great Hall in 2008.  His lecture was titled, “The Role of Judges in a Government Of, By, and For the People.”  In classic Weinsteinian (and Cardozan) fashion, he stated that it was important for judges to “recognize and accept the duty to help the disadvantaged where the law, reasonably construed, allows such support.”[10]  He stated: “It is appropriate for a judge to ask, ‘Does my decision unnecessarily widen the gap between rich and poor, advantaged and disadvantaged?’”  That statement is profound and worth consideration—not just by judges, but also by lawyers in public service and private practice.  Is our work enhancing fundamental aspects of our shared humanity, or is it leading to their destruction?

My third and final task tonight is to thank the law firms that have generously agreed to sponsor the reception that will follow the lecture.  They are Cleary Gottleib, Hecker Fink, Fried Frank, and Patterson Belknap where I work.

I’ll now turn it over to Jude Lohier to introduce Judge Rakoff.