Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurterwas a jurist, who served as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Frankfurter was born in Vienna and immigrated to New York at the age of 12. He graduated from Harvard Law School and was active politically, helping to found the American Civil Liberties Union. He was a friend and adviser of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1939. Frankfurter served on the Supreme Court for 23 years, and was...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSupreme Court Justice
Date of Birth15 November 1882
CountryUnited States of America
For the highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one's personal pulls and one's private views to the law of which we are all guaradians - those impersonal convictions that made a society a civilized community, and not the victims of personal rule.
The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.
If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, "good fences make good neighbors.
After all, advocates, including advocates for States, are like managers of pugilistic and election contestants, in that they have a propensity for claiming everything.
Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for all times to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine?
One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution... But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic.
It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of 'laws' to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it.
To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.
In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn't his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one.
The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.
In law also the emphasis makes the song.
I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.
Certainly the affirmative pursuit of one's convictions about the ultimate mystery of the universe and man's relation to it is placed beyond the reach of law. Government may not interfere with organized or individual expressions of belief or disbelief. Propagation of belief - or even of disbelief - in the supernatural is protected, whether in church or chapel, mosque or synagogue, tabernacle or meeting-house.
It is hostile to a democratic system to involve the judiciary in the politics of the people.