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.

Gratitude

“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.

Peace , Faith

“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.

“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

Understanding , Dependency

“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.

Question

“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.

Drawing

“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

“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

Marriage , Law

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

Felix Frankfurter

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

Wisdom

“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

Men , Fear

“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

Confidence

“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

History

“[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