Felix Frankfurter: Trending quotes

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“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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