Robert C. Cornell

In Robert Clifford Cornell the administration of the law and the fellowship of the Century have lost a citizen of unusual qualities, tested in an unusual way. Having served after 1895 in one of the older city magistracies, he was placed in 1910 at the head of the new and experimental Domestic Relations Court, where he soon won high respect for his useful services. Starting with strong and positive opinions as to the general causes of the breakdown of family life among the poor, he investigated with kind and human sympathy the specific cases which came before him, and was very soon recognized as a power for good by the very men and women whom he had to rebuke or warn. It was a police officer at the door of his court who once, in reply to an inquiry, declared that “he is the best judge the court ever had, because he takes time to investigate and the poor get justice.” In the words of one of his associates on the bench, he was “a man of learning, culture, and refinement; at all times the gentleman with a big heart that beat in sympathy with the poor.”

Sportsman and athlete, one of Columbia’s early notabilities in the football field and on the crew, he never wholly gave up his boxing or his rowing, and his unfailing cure for the mental and physical exhaustion of prolonged attention to his judicial duties was a week in the forest.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1919 Century Association Yearbook