Fairchild Professor of Law Andrew L. Kaufman took more than 40 years to complete his magnum opus on former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo.

And this week, the painstaking effort he devoted to the project has paid off, as his book Cardozo, was named the best law book of 1999 by Scribes, the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects.

The 578-page book, which was published last year by the Harvard University Press, has been widely praised as the definitive biography on Cardozo, a progressive justice who voted to affirm the New Deal programs on which the court was deeply divided.

The project began in 1957 when Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter gave him his personal files on the justice.

"He knew I was interested in judicial biography and he asked me if I was interested in writing about Cardozo, because he thought it was time," Kaufman said. Kaufman had been working as a legal clerk to Frankfurter at the time.

Kaufman had written essays and law review articles--including some on Cardozo--in the past, but Cardozo was his first full-scale biography, and Kaufman said the genre posed new challenges.

"It's a challenge writing about somebody's life, especially someone so private," he said.

Still, in selecting the book, Scribes praised the first-time biographer for his readable style.

"It's a type of biography that grabs the reader," said Michael B. Hyman, a Chicago attorney who chaired Scribes' selection committee. "You feel as though you're there, and you're part of the story."

Now, Kaufman--a specialist in legal ethics--plans to return to more familiar territory.

"It's certainly going to be my only full-length biography," Kaufman said. "I'm going to turn back to other things I'm interested in doing."

The Scribes' "Best Law Book" award comes with no monetary stipend, but Kaufman--who said he was "pleased" by the honor--has won recognition from several other sources as well.

He won an award from the Supreme Court Historical Society, which did come with a stipend, on the condition that he give a talk in the Supreme Court's court-room.

The book also won a joint award from the New York State Archives and New York Board of Regents.

Scribes selected the book for the best law book honor from over 60 works submitted by publishers on all variety of legal subjects, from biographies to histories to textbooks and legal treatises.

"We had a committee of maybe five of us who read through, over a period of months, each of the entries," Hyman said.

Scribes gave honorable mention awards to Akhil Reed Amar's The Bill of Rights and Allan Farnsworth's Changing Your Mind: The Law of Regretted Decisions, both published by Yale University Press.