Even before her nomination by President Obama, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a child of Puerto Rican-born parents, was identified as potentially the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. Almost immediately, that designation was challenged by students or aged observers who remembered the name Benjamin Cardozo, an Associate Justice from 1932 to 1938.
Who Was Cardozo?
Cardozo was born in 1870, the son of a New York judge. Educated at Columbia Law School, he was elected to the New York Supreme Court, which is a trial court, in 1913, and appointed to the New York State Court of Appeals the following year. He was elected to a full 14-year term in 1917 and served until 1932, when he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Herbert Hoover to replace the legendary Oliver Wendell Holmes.
By that time, he had established a reputation as an outstanding authority on the application of the common law and as a progressive jurist who nevertheless deferred to the prerogatives of the executive and legislative branches. His four published collections of essays on the philosophy of law were widely respected and his lectures were eagerly attended.
Legal scholar Bernard Schwartz rated Cardozo as follows: "Except for Holmes himself, Justice Cardozo was the preeminent judge of the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Cardozo was the outstanding common-law jurist of the twentieth century."
But Was He Hispanic?
The question is difficult to answer because the now-popular term Hispanic is imprecise. It was not widely used in the 1930's. What was notable about Cardozo's appointment was that a second Jew was being added to the Court only 16 years after Louis Brandeis became the first. Cardozo's family had a tradition that its ancestors, who reached America in the 18th century, originated in Portugal.
Most Hispanic organizations and the U.S. Census Bureau do not regard Portuguese as Hispanic. Moreover, the practical definition of Hispanic used by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials is people descended from countries in the Americas with a Spanish-language heritage, not even including those from Spain itself.
Nevertheless, Representative Dennis Cardoza of California, whose ancestors came from the Portuguese Azores Islands is a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and former California Representative Tony Coelho, who describes himself as Portuguse-American, was a member of that Caucus when he served in the HOuse of Representatives.
Cardozo was Hispanic only if Iberian Peninsula origins qualify. Regardless, he was one of the great legal figures of the last century.
Sources: Schwartz, Bernard, A History of the Supreme Court, Oxford University Press, p.229
"Was a Hispanic Justice on the Court in the 30's,?" NYTimes article 5/27/09
