Saturday, October 24, 2015
I mourn Judge Cardamone's passing. He was a great Judge, one of the best ever to have served on the Second Circuit. So thoughtful, such a vivid, learned writer. And so kindly on the bench during oral arguments, unlike some Judges who love to torture the lawyers who appear before that Court. Learning of his death brought tears to my eyes. The only other federal judge that I felt this warmly about was Justice William O. Douglas. I only wish that Judge Cardamone could have been elevated to the Supreme Court. He deserved that level of achievement and respect. But his work on the Court of Appeals was the best since Learned Hand, in my opinion. So he is in a legal pantheon.
I'm a little prejudiced, because he authored the opinions in two of my most important cases during my legal career, but not mentioned in the NYT obituary. The most recent was Guiles v. Marineau, 461 F.3d 320 (2nd Cir. 2006), upholding the right of a Vermont middle school student to wear an anti-Bush T-shirt in his public school class. The school had suspended him for doing so. The other case was National Audubon Society v. Hoffman, 132 F.3d 7 (2nd Cir. 1997), which stopped a grotesque U.S Forest Service plan to clear-cut critical black bear and neo-tropical songbird breeding habitat on the Green Mountain National Forest.
Judge Cardamone was a humanist, in the best sense of that word, who never hesitated to speak truth to power.
What a great man! I am so sorry for your loss.
