Felix Frankfurter: Constitution

Felix Frankfurter was American judge. Explore interesting quotes on constitution.
Felix Frankfurter: 134 quotes0 likes

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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