Felix Frankfurter Quotes (67 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Famous Felix Frankfurter Quotes

“Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”

Dissenting, Henslee v. Union Planters National Bank & Trust Co., 335 U.S. 600 (1949).
Judicial opinions

“A license cannot be revoked because a man is redheaded or because he was divorced, except for a calling, if such there be, for which redheadedness or an unbroken marriage may have some rational bearing. If a State licensing agency lays bare its arbitrary action, or if the State law explicitly allows it to act arbitrarily, that is precisely the kind of State action which the Due Process Clause forbids.”

Felix Frankfurter

Barsky v. Board of Regents, 347 U.S. 442, 470 (1954).
Judicial opinions

“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.”

Felix Frankfurter

Watts v. Indiana, 338 U.S. 49, 52 (1949).
Judicial opinions

“Of compelling consideration is the fact that words acquire scope and function from the history of events which they summarize.”

Felix Frankfurter

Phelps Dodge Corp. v. National Labor Relations Board, 313 U.S. 177, 185-186 (1941).
Judicial opinions

“To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.”

Felix Frankfurter

Cobbledick v. United States, 309 U.S. 323, 324 (1940).
Judicial opinions

“The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.”

Felix Frankfurter

Dennis v. United States, 241 U.S. 494, 556 (1951).
Judicial opinions

Felix Frankfurter Quotes about laws

“I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously, because 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.”

Felix Frankfurter

Source: Other writings, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960), P. 189.

“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.”

Felix Frankfurter

A Heritage For All Who Love The Law 51 ABAJ 330 (1965); quoted by United States Senator Howell Heflin during the confirmation debate for Justice David Souter, on September 24, 1990, S13540.
Other writings

“The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.”

Felix Frankfurter

Twenty Years of Mr. Justice Holmes' Constitutional Opinions, 36 HARV. L. REV. 909, 931 (1923).
Other writings

“What becomes decisive to a Justice's functioning on the Court in the large area within which his individuality moves is his general attitude toward law, the habits of the mind that he has formed or is capable of unforming, his capacity for detachment, his temperament or training for putting his passion behind his judgment instead of in front of it. The attitudes and qualities which I am groping to characterize are ingredients of what compendiously might be called dominating humility.”

Felix Frankfurter

Foreward, to "Memorial issue for Robert H. Jackson", 55 Columbia Law Review (April, 1955) p. 436; quoted by United States Senator Howell Heflin during the confirmation debate for Justice David Souter, on September 24, 1990, S13540.
Other writings

“I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.”

Felix Frankfurter

Of Law and Life and Other Things: Papers and Address of Felix Frankfurter (1965).
Other writings

“If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.”

Felix Frankfurter

Concurring, United States v. United Mine Workers, 330 U.S. 312 (1946).
Judicial opinions

Felix Frankfurter Quotes about history

“The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.”

Felix Frankfurter

Writing for the court, McNabb v. United States, 318 U.S. 332 (1943).
Judicial opinions

“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.”

Felix Frankfurter

The Supreme Court, vol. 3, no. 1, Parliamentary Affairs (London, Winter 1949).
Other writings

“It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.”

Felix Frankfurter

Davis v. United States, 328 U.S. 582, 597 (1946).
Judicial opinions

“It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.”

Felix Frankfurter

United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950).
Judicial opinions

“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.”

Felix Frankfurter

Dissenting, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnett, 319 U.S. 624 (1943).
Judicial opinions

Felix Frankfurter: Trending quotes

“Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep.”

Felix Frankfurter

Speech accepting an award from the National Institute for Immigrant Welfare, Biltmore Hotel, New York (May 11, 1933).
Other writings
Context: Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep. I can express with very limited adequacy the passionate devotion to this land that possesses millions of our people, born, like myself, under other skies, for the privilege that that this county has bestowed in allowing them to partake of its fellowship.

“It must never be forgotten, however, that the Bill of Rights was the child of the Enlightenment. Back of the guarantee of free speech lay faith in the power of an appeal to reason by all the peaceful means for gaining access to the mind.”

Felix Frankfurter

Writing for the court, Milk Wagon Drivers Union of Chicago, Local 753. v. Meadowmoor Dairies, Inc., 312 U.S. 287 (1941).
Judicial opinions
Context: It must never be forgotten, however, that the Bill of Rights was the child of the Enlightenment. Back of the guarantee of free speech lay faith in the power of an appeal to reason by all the peaceful means for gaining access to the mind. It was in order to avert force and explosions due to restrictions upon rational modes of communication that the guarantee of free speech was given a generous scope. But utterance in a context of violence can lose its significance as an appeal to reason and become part of an instrument of force. Such utterance was not meant to be sheltered by the Constitution.

“National unity is the basis of national security.”

Felix Frankfurter

Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586 (1940).
Judicial opinions
Context: National unity is the basis of national security. To deny the legislature the right to select appropriate means for its attainment presents a totally different order of problem from that of the propriety of subordinating the possible ugliness of littered streets to the free expression opinion through handbills.

Felix Frankfurter Quotes

“Congress is, after all, not a body of laymen unfamiliar with the commonplaces of our law. This legislation was the formulation of the two Judiciary Committees, all of whom are lawyers, and the Congress is predominately a lawyers' body.”

Felix Frankfurter

Callanan v. United States, 364 U.S. 587, 594 (1961).
Judicial opinions

“All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.”

Felix Frankfurter

Reply to counsel who said a challenge from the bench was “just a matter of semantics,” Reader’s Digest (June 1964).
Other writings

“But answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.”

Felix Frankfurter

Dissenting, Priebe and Sons v. United States, 332 U.S. 407, 420 (1947).
Judicial opinions
Context: If one starts with the assumption that, in the absence of specific Congressional authority, a fixed rule of law precludes contracting officers from providing in a Government contract terms reasonably calculated to assure its performance even though there be no money loss through a particular default, there is no problem. But answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.

“Judicial judgment must take deep account…of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.”

Felix Frankfurter

Quoted in National Observer (Silver Spring, Maryland, March 1, 1965).
Other writings

“Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines”

Felix Frankfurter

Dissenting in Pearce v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 315 U.S. 543, 558 (1942).
Judicial opinions
Context: The line must follow some direction of policy, whether rooted in logic or experience. Lines should not be drawn simply for the sake of drawing lines.

“Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand.”

Felix Frankfurter

Rogers v. Richmond, 365 U.S. 534, 540-41 (1961).
Judicial opinions
Context: Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i. e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial 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 charges against an accused out of his own mouth.

“The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.”

Felix Frankfurter

Dissenting in New York v. United States, 331 U.S. 284, 353 (1947).
Judicial opinions

“[It is anomalous] to hold that in order to convict a man the police cannot extract by force what is in his mind, but can extract what is in his stomach.”

Felix Frankfurter

Writing for the court, Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165 (1952). The unanimous decision reversed the conviction of an alleged drug addict because evidence was obtained by forced stomach pumping.
Judicial opinions

“Ambiguity lurks in generality and may thus become an instrument of severity.”

Felix Frankfurter

McComb v. Jacksonville Paper Co., 336 U.S. 187, 197 (1949).
Judicial opinions

“The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.”

Felix Frankfurter

Concurring, American Federation of Labor v. American Sash & Door Co., 335 U.S. 538 (1949).
Judicial opinions

“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.”

Felix Frankfurter

News summaries (August 9, 1964).
Other writings

“The Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination.”

Felix Frankfurter

On the Fifteenth Amendment; writing for the court, Lane v. Wilson, 307 U.S. 268, 275 (1939).
Judicial opinions

“Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.”

Felix Frankfurter

Indianapolis v. Chase Nat'l Bank, 314 U.S. 63, 69 (1941).
Other writings

“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.”

Felix Frankfurter

Reported in Proceedings in honor of Mr. Justice Frankfurter and distinguished alumni at the meeting of the Council, Harvard Law School Association in Cambridge, April 30, 1960.
Other writings

“It is a wise man who said that there is no greater inequality than the equal treatment of unequals.”

Felix Frankfurter

Concurring, Dennis v. United States, 339 U.S. 162, 184 (1950).
Judicial opinions

“After all, advocates, including advocates for States, are like managers of pugilistic and election contestants, in that they have a propensity for claiming everything.”

Felix Frankfurter

First Iowa Coop. v. Power Comm'n., 328 U.S. 152, 187 (1946).
Judicial opinions

“Holmes said Emerson had a beautiful voice, and, of course, Holmes had one of the most beautiful voices the Lord ever put into a throat.”

Felix Frankfurter

On Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 59.
Other writings, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960)

“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.”

Felix Frankfurter

Concurring, Tiller v. Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Co., 318 U.S. 54 (1943).
Judicial opinions

“After all, this is the Nation's ultimate judicial tribunal, nor a super-legal-aid bureau.”

Felix Frankfurter

Dissent, Uveges v. Pennsylvania, 335 U.S. 437 (1948).
Judicial opinions

“No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.”

Felix Frankfurter

The Commerce Clause (1937), p. 12.
Other writings

“The most constructive way of resolving conflicts is to avoid them.”

Felix Frankfurter

Concurring, Western Pacific Railroad Corp. v. Western Pacific Railroad Co., 345 U.S. 247, 270 (1953).
Judicial opinions

“It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.”

Felix Frankfurter

Craig v. Harney, 331 U.S. 367, 392 (1947).
Judicial opinions

“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?”

Felix Frankfurter

Dissenting, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnett, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943).
Judicial opinions

“While it is not always profitable to analogize "fact" to "fiction," La Fontaine's fable of the crow, the cheese, and the fox demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between holding a piece of cheese in the beak and putting it in the stomach.”

Felix Frankfurter

Alleghany Corp. v. Breswick & Co., 353 U.S. 151, 170 (1957).
Judicial opinions

“Morals are three-quarters manners.”

Felix Frankfurter

Source: Other writings, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960), P. 12. In the interview, Phillips quotes the line to Frankfurter from a letter written by the Justice, and Frankfurter attributes the phrase to a friend named Matthew Arnold.

“I came into the world a Jew, and although I did not live my life entirely as a Jew, I think it is fitting that I should leave as a Jew. I don’t want to … turn my back on a great and noble heritage.”

Felix Frankfurter

Quoted by Garson Kanin in Atlantic (March 1964).
Other writings

“Emerson said to him, "Young man, have you read Plato?" Holmes said he hadn't. "You must. You must read Plato. But you must hold him at arm's length and say, 'Plato, you have delighted and edified mankind for two thousand years. What have you to say to me?'" Holmes said, "That's the lesson of independence." So off he went and read Plato for a few moths or a year, and then wrote a piece doing in Mr. Plato in one of those ephemeral literary things at Harvard. He laid this, as it were, at the feet of Mr. Emerson and awaited the next morning's mail, hoping to get a warm appreciation from Emerson. And the next day and the next and the next — no sign of life. No acknowledgment from Mr. Emerson. Holmes didn't see him again for about a year. When he saw him, this, that, and the other thing was again talked about. Emerson said, "Oh, by the way, I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him."”

Felix Frankfurter

Holmes said, "That was the second great lesson — humility."
Source: Other writings, Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960), P. 59.

“Time and experience have forcefully taught that the power to inspect dwelling places, either as a matter of systematic area-by-area search or, as here, to treat a specific problem, is of indispensable importance in the maintenance of community health; a power that would be greatly hobbled by the blanket requirement of the safeguards necessary for a search of evidence of criminal acts.”

Felix Frankfurter

Frank v. Maryland, 359 U.S. 360, 372 (1959); majority opinion in 5-4 ruling that allowed health inspectors to enter a private home without a search warrant (May 4, 1959).
Judicial opinions

“In this Court dissents have gradually become majority opinions.”

Felix Frankfurter

Concurring, Graves v. New York ex rel. O'Keefe, 306 U.S. 446 (1939).
Judicial opinions

“Decisions of this Court do not have intrinsic authority.”

Felix Frankfurter

Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 59 (1947).
Judicial opinions

“No court can make time stand still.”

Felix Frankfurter

Writing for the court, Scripps-Howard Radio, Inc. v. FCC, 316 U.S. 4 (1942).
Judicial opinions

“Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.”

Felix Frankfurter

New York Times (November 28, 1954).
Judicial opinions

“Lincoln's appeal to "the better angels of our nature" failed to avert a fratricidal war. But the compassionate wisdom of Lincoln's first and second inaugurals bequeathed to the Union, cemented with blood, a moral heritage which, when drawn upon in times of stress and strife, is sure to find specific ways and means to surmount difficulties that may appear to be insurmountable.”

Felix Frankfurter

Concurring, Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958).
Judicial opinions

“The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.”

Felix Frankfurter

Concurring, Graves v. New York ex rel. O'Keefe, 306 U.S. 446 (1939).
Judicial opinions

“In law also the emphasis makes the song.”

Felix Frankfurter

Bethlehem Steel Co. v. New York State Labor Relations Board 330 U.S. 767, 780 (1947).
Judicial opinions

“In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives.”

Felix Frankfurter

Dissenting, Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962).
Judicial opinions

“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.”

Felix Frankfurter

Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway. v. Browning, 310 U.S. 362, 369 (1940).
Judicial opinions

“Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.”

Felix Frankfurter

Dissenting, Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 270 (1962).
Judicial opinions

“It is true of opinions as of other compositions that those who are seeped in them, whose ears are sensitive to literary nuances, whose antennae record subtle silences, can gather from their contents meaning beyond the words. All this presupposes, of course, a grasp of the nature of the Supreme Court's functions — the scope and limits of its constitutional authority — and often, as well, familiarity with the record and briefs of a particular case whose opinion record and briefs of a particular case whose opinion is under scrutiny.”

Felix Frankfurter

"'The Administrative Side' of Chief Justice Hughes", 63 Harvard Law Review 1, 2 (1949).
Other writings

“If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, "good fences make good neighbors."”

Felix Frankfurter

McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203, 232 (1948).
Judicial opinions

“A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not on another occasion indulge its own will.”

Felix Frankfurter

Concurring, American Federation of Labor v. American Sash & Door Co., 335 U.S. 538, 557 (1949).
Judicial opinions

“In any event, mere speed is not a test of justice. Deliberate speed is. Deliberate speed takes time. But it is time well spent.”

Felix Frankfurter

First Iowa Coop. v. Power Comm'n., 328 U.S. 152, 188 (1946).
Judicial opinions

“One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.”

Felix Frankfurter

"The Supreme Court in the Mirror of Justice," University of Pennsylvania Law Review (April, 1957), p. 786.
Other writings

“The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.”

Felix Frankfurter

Quoted by Garson Kanin in Atlantic (March 1964).
Other writings

“The course of decision in this Court has thus far jealously enforced the principle of a free society secured by the prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures. Its safeguards are not to be worn away by a process of devitalizing interpretation.”

Felix Frankfurter

Davis v. United States, 328 U.S. 582, 597 (1946).
Judicial opinions

“Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i. e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial 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 charges against an accused out of his own mouth.”

Felix Frankfurter

Rogers v. Richmond, 365 U.S. 534, 540-41 (1961).
Judicial opinions

“Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.”

Felix Frankfurter

The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.
New York Times (November 28, 1954).
Judicial opinions