Michael A. Cardozo, a litigator for corporations and professional sports organizations who served longer than anyone else as New York City’s chief legal officer, a role in which he oversaw cases defending stop-and-frisk policing and the city’s ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, died on July 23 at his home in White Plains, N.Y. He was 84.
His daughter Sheryl Cardozo confirmed the death without specifying the cause, saying only that it followed a brief illness.
Given his surname, Mr. Cardozo once said, he was destined to become a lawyer. His paternal great-grandfather’s cousin was Benjamin Cardozo (1870-1938), an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court who was appointed by President Herbert Hoover in 1932.
“Some people thought I was going to be a lawyer from the day I was born,” he told Law.com.
From 1996 to 1998, Mr. Cardozo served as president of the New York City Bar Association, which was established in 1870 to ferret out corruption in the court system. One of its first investigations led to the resignation of Albert Cardozo, a State Supreme Court justice who was Benjamin Cardozo’s father.
Michael Cardozo was a partner at Proskauer Rose (formerly Proskauer, Rose, Goetz & Mendelsohn) when he was appointed as the city’s corporation counsel by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in 2002. He stepped down in 2014, returning to Proskauer after setting a record for longevity in that municipal role, which was established in 1839.
As corporation counsel, Mr. Cardozo presided over almost 700 lawyers, who juggled a caseload of some 80,000 lawsuits and other legal matters at the city’s Law Department.
As the city government’s top lawyer, he successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 that the federal courts could resolve disputes between localities and foreign governments over delinquent property taxes. The case, Permanent Mission of India v. City of New York, involved the Indian and Mongolian missions to the United Nations in New York.
Mr. Cardozo successfully oversaw the case in which a federal judge ruled in 2009 that legislation by the City Council enabled Mr. Bloomberg to seek a third term, despite limits imposed by the City Charter.
He also defended the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk strategy, whose critics said it disproportionately singled out Black and Hispanic men (the tactics were ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2013). He defended a city policy of inspecting carry-on bags in the subway; argued in favor of a provision that would have allowed the city to borrow $2.5 billion to pay off 1970s-era debt; and argued, again successfully, for the city’s right to impose smoking bans in bars and restaurants as well as additional gun controls.
In 2019, back at Proskauer, Mr. Cardozo represented Judith Clark, the getaway driver in a 1981 robbery of a Brink’s armored car in Rockland County, N.Y., in her efforts to win parole after serving 37 years in prison. She won the case.
Mr. Cardozo retired from the law firm in 2022, a month after Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York name him to the state ethics commission.
In a recent statement on Instagram, Mr. Bloomberg said he had recruited Mr. Cardozo “not only for his sharp legal acumen, but also for his unassailable integrity and lifelong commitment to the city’s civic health.”
Michael Alan Cardozo was born on June 28, 1941, in Manhattan. His mother, Lucile (Lebair) Cardozo, was a school administrator; his father, Harmon Cardozo, was a real estate executive.
Michael grew up on the West Side of Manhattan and in Westport, Conn. After graduating from Staples High School in Westport, he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Brown University in 1963 and a juris doctor degree from Columbia Law School in 1966. He went on to clerk for Judge Edward C. McLean of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan and then joined Proskauer in 1967; he became a partner in 1974.
When David Stern, a law school classmate who was also a partner at the firm, was named commissioner of the National Basketball Association in 1984, Mr. Cardozo began representing the N.B.A., and later Major League Soccer and the National Hockey League as well.
In 2002, as the city’s new corporation counsel, Mr. Cardozo inherited a department that was scattered in dozens of locations after being displaced the year before by the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, which was a block from the main office.
At the Law Department, he created new divisions that focused on volunteer work and specialized in labor law and other issues, and he refused to settle suits against the city that were deemed frivolous.
“We certainly want to send the message,” he told The New York Times in 2013, “that if you don’t bring what we view to be a meritorious case, you’re going to have a big battle on your hands.”
During his time with the Law Department, the city settled a number of lawsuits involving police abuse and also defended against challenges to the beefed-up security it imposed after the Sept. 11 attack.
Reflecting on his tenure as the city’s chief legal officer, Mr. Cardozo told students at Columbia Law School in a 2014 lecture that in defending or enforcing existing laws on behalf of the city, he was sometimes compelled to take a stance that he may have disagreed with personally. One example, he said, was when the city appealed a court ruling declaring that the state’s prohibition on gay marriage was unconstitutional.
In addition to his daughter Sheryl, Mr. Cardozo is survived by his wife, Nancy (Cogut) Cardozo, whom he married in 1965; another daughter, Hedy Cardozo; and three grandchildren.
Mr. Cardozo was particularly focused on the judicial system. He lobbied for higher pay for judges, who were overworked, he said. (At one point, he was a member of the New York State Commission on Legislative, Judicial and Executive Compensation.) And he expressed frustration with the court system over what he called its repeated delays in trial decisions.
In 2009, he said publicly that the “entire culture” of the judicial system “must be changed” to “improve judicial accountability and, with it, judicial performance.” For those comments, he was rebuked in a letter published in The New York Law Journal and signed by 18 of 20 State Supreme Court justices.
In an online tribute after Mr. Cardozo’s death, Bret Parker, the executive director of the City Bar Association, singled out Mr. Cardozo’s “ longstanding commitment to the rule of law and tireless advocacy for an independent judiciary.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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