Sanford Harold Kadish was born in 1921 in New York City, and grew up in the Bronx. He graduated from City College of New York, Phi Beta Kappa, and then attended a Japanese language school in Colorado. He served in the United States Navy during World War II, translating Japanese military documents from the Pacific, until he was discharged in 1946. Kadish earned his law degree from Columbia Law School in 1948; during that time he studied with professors Herb Wechsler and Walter Gellhorn, who were influential on his career and scholarship. After law school, he practiced privately in New York before entering legal academia in 1951 at the University of Utah Law School, where he taught for ten years. He then joined the University of Michigan in 1961, before he joined UC Berkeley's School of Law in 1964, where he stayed until his retirement in 1999. He served as Boalt's Dean from 1975 to 1982, and continued to serve as emeritus faculty even after his retirement in 1999. During his years in academia, he worked with Wechsler on the ALI's Model Penal Code, which was to prove hugely influential in reforming American criminal law. He also published the first edition of his criminal law casebook, Criminal Law and Its Processes, which became the leading criminal law casebook for decades.
Scholarship
Kadish was renowned as "the preeminent criminal law scholar of his generation", "America's foremost scholar of the criminal law", and "the dean of American criminal law academicians". He has been described as "the leading scholar in... criminal law theory", who was largely responsible for shaping the field. In his scholarship and his work on legal reform, Kadish applied a sociological lens to criminal law and criminology. Kadish authored the leading criminal law casebook and the first comprehensive encyclopedia of criminal law. Kadish is particularly cited for a number of contributions, including:
criticizing the criminalization of so-called "victimless crimes", which led to removal of most such crimes from the Model Penal Code
providing impetus to the sentencing reform movement with an article on criminal procedure, "Legal Norm and Discretion in the Police and Sentencing Process", 75 Harv. L. Rev. 904
a highly cited article on due process, "Methodology and Criteria in Due Process Adjudication -- A Survey and Criticism", 66 Yale L.J. 319
scholarship on excuses and exceptions in criminal law, including several articles and ultimately a formulation in his criminal law casebook that shaped the treatment of this topic in all subsequent casebooks
studies of the codification of law, beginning with his contributions to the Model Penal Code
his influential casebook, Criminal Law and Its Processes, which "took the field of criminal law class materials by storm, revolutionized the prevalent approach to teaching the first-year course, and projected a vision of the subject matter that deservedly dominated the field." "With the possible exception of the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code, these materials are the single most influential document in shaping the study and the teaching of criminal law in America today."
Kadish was the son of Frances R. Kadish. Kadish co-authored some work with his brother, Mortimer Kadish, a philosopher. He was married to June Kadish for 68 years, with whom he had two sons, Josh and Peter Kadish.
