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
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.
There is torture of mind as well as body; the will is as much affected by fear as by force. And there comes a point where this Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.
It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
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