Everything about Felix Frankfurter totally explained
Felix Frankfurter (
November 15,
1882 –
February 22,
1965) was an
Associate Justice of the
United States Supreme Court.
Early life
Frankfurter was born in
Vienna, Austria. He immigrated with his family to the United States in 1894, and grew up on New York City's
Lower East Side. He studied at
The Cooper Union and
City College of New York. After graduating from
City College of New York, he attended
New York Law School, but in 1902 transferred to
Harvard Law School, where he became an editor of the
Harvard Law Review and eventually graduated with one of the best academic records since
Louis Brandeis.
Legal career
In 1906, Frankfurter became the assistant of
Henry Stimson, a New York attorney. In 1911, President
William Howard Taft appointed Stimson as his
Secretary of War and Stimson appointed Frankfurter as law officer of the
Bureau of Insular Affairs. During the
War in Europe he acted as major and judge-advocate, and as secretary and counsel of the President's mediation commission.
In 1918, leaders within the American Jewish community convened the first
American Jewish Congress in
Philadelphia's historic
Independence Hall. Frankfurter, joined by
Rabbi Stephen Wise, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Louis Brandeis, and others to lay the groundwork for a national Democratic organization comprised of Jewish leaders from all over the country, to rally for equal rights for all Americans regardless of race, religion or national ancestry.
In 1919, Frankfurter served as a
Zionist delegate to the
Paris Peace Conference. He lobbied President
Woodrow Wilson to incorporate the
Balfour Declaration into the treaty. In 1920, Frankfurter helped to found the
American Civil Liberties Union. In the late 1920s, he joined efforts to save the lives of
Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two
anarchists who had been sentenced to death on robbery/murder charges.
Criminal justice in Cleveland
In 1922,
Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter undertook a detailed quantitative study of crime reporting in
Cleveland,
Ohio,
newspapers for January 1919, counting column inches. They found that whereas, in the first half of the month, the total amount of space given over to crime was 925 inches, in the second half it lept to 6,642 inches. This was in spite the fact that the number of crimes reported had increased only from 345 to 363.
They concluded that although the city's much publicized "
crime wave" was largely fictitious and manufactured by the press, the coverage had a very real consequence for the administration of criminal justice. Because the public believed they were in the middle of a crime epidemic, they demanded an immediate response from the police and the city authorities. These agencies complied, wishing to retain public support, caring "more to satisfy popular demand than to be observant of the tried process of law". The result was a greatly increased likelihood of miscarriages of justice and sentences more severe than the offenses warranted.
His long research into the power behind government in the United States led him to state "The real rulers in
Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes."
Bibliography
Frankfurter published several books including
Cases Under the Interstate Commerce Act; The Business of the Supreme Court (1927);
Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court (1938);
The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (1927) and
Felix Frankfurter Reminisces (1960). Frankfurter was known as the nation's preeminent scholar on labor law. From 1914 to his appointment to the Supreme Court, Frankfurter was a popular
professor at
Harvard Law School. Frankfurter served as an informal advisor to President Roosevelt on many
New Deal measures.
In 1943 Frankfurter met
Jan Karski at Washington D.C. Before—on
29 July 1943—Karski had had a talk with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In both of the meetings the topic was the murderous and highly desperate situation of Jews.
Supreme Court
On
January 5,
1939, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated Frankfurter to the U.S. Supreme Court. He served from
January 30,
1939 to
August 28,
1962.
Despite his
liberal political leanings, Frankfurter became the court's most outspoken advocate of
judicial restraint, the view that courts shouldn't interpret the fundamental law, the
constitution, in such a way as to impose sharp limits upon the authority of the
legislative and
executive branches. In this philosophy, Frankfurter was heavily influenced by his close friend and mentor
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had taken a firm stand during his tenure on the bench against the doctrine of "economic
due process". Frankfurter revered Justice Holmes, often citing Holmes in his opinions. In practice this meant Frankfurter was generally willing to uphold the actions of those branches against constitutional challenges so long as they didn't "shock the conscience." Frankfurter was particularly well known as a scholar of
civil procedure. Later in his career, this philosophy frequently put him on the dissenting side of ground-breaking decisions of the
Warren court. However, Frankfurter was a strong foe of
racial segregation and joined the Court's unanimous opinion in
Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which prohibited segregation in public schools. Frankfurter encouraged the
Morgenthau Plan against Germany in
World War II.
For the October 1948 Term, Frankfurter hired
William Thaddeus Coleman as a law clerk, making Coleman the first African-American Supreme Court law clerk.
Retirement
Frankfurter retired in 1962 after suffering a
stroke and was succeeded by
Arthur Goldberg. He was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963.
Felix Frankfurter died from
congestive heart failure at the age of 83. His remains are interred in the
Mount Auburn Cemetery in
Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
There are two extensive collections of Frankfurter's papers: one at the Manuscript Division of the
Library of Congress and the other at Harvard University. Both are fully open for research and have been distributed to other libraries on microfilm. A chapter of the
Aleph Zadik Aleph in Scottsdale, AZ is named in his honor.
Trivia
In a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter described Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee as "professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism and self-interest."
Upon hearing of Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson's death, Frankfurter remarked that it was the first solid piece of evidence he'd seen to prove the existence of God. It should be noted that this story was tied to a scheduled reargument in which Vinson's vote could be crucial (in Brown vs. Board of Education, where ostensibly Vinson wasn't disposed to overrule Plessy vs. Ferguson), and in any event, some believe the story to be "possibly apocryphal."
Memorable Quotes
"In a democracy, the highest office is the office of citizen."Further Information
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