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
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.
The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression.
Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes.
A phrase begins life as a literary expression; its felicity leads to its lazy repetition; and repetition soon establishes it as a legal formula, undiscriminatingly used to express different and sometimes contradictory ideas.
The words of the Constitution are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
Ours is an accusational and not an inquisitorial system - a system in which the state must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured and may not by coercion prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth
Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling
The real rulers in Washington are invisible to exercise power from behind the scenes
It must take account of what it decrees for today in order that today may not paralyze tomorrow.
Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of achieving a free society.
The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.
As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard.
A license cannot be be revoked because a man is red-headed or because he was divorced, except for a calling, if such there be, for which red-headedness or an unbroken marriage may have some rational bearing
Decisions of this Court do not have intrinsic authority