Felix Frankfurter: Quotes about laws

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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.

“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

“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

“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