Law Commons^™

Discretion And Judicial Decision: The Elusive Quest For The Fetters That Bind Judges, Kent Greenawalt

Faculty Scholarship

"The Judge as a Legislator" is the subtitle of the third of Benjamin Cardozo's famous lectures on The Nature of the Judicial Process, delivered in 1921. Though emphasizing the restraints under which judges should act, Cardozo nevertheless compares the task of the judge with that of the legislator:

The choice of methods, the appraisement of values, must in the end be guided by like considerations for the one as for the other. Each indeed is legislating within the limits of his competence. No doubt the limits for the judge are narrower. He legislates only between gaps. He fills the open …