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 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."