Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurterwas a jurist, who served as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Frankfurter was born in Vienna and immigrated to New York at the age of 12. He graduated from Harvard Law School and was active politically, helping to found the American Civil Liberties Union. He was a friend and adviser of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1939. Frankfurter served on the Supreme Court for 23 years, and was...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSupreme Court Justice
Date of Birth15 November 1882
CountryUnited States of America
Felix Frankfurter quotes about
Decisions of this Court do not have intrinsic authority
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
Ours is an accusational 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 charge against an accused out of his own mouth
No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
We forget that the most successful statesmen have been professionals. Lincoln was a professional politician.
If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, "good fences make good neighbors.
The indispensible judicial requisite is intellectual humility.
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.
The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.
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.
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.
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.