Skip to content

Felix Frankfurter Quotes

1882–1965 Austria

Felix Frankfurter (November 15, 1882 – February 22, 1965) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Austria
Judges
Lawyers
Non-fiction authors

Also known as: Frankfurter, Felix

Random Felix Frankfurter quote

60 quotes

In this Court dissents have gradually become majority opinions.

Decisions of this Court do not have equal intrinsic authority.

Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.

One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.

The mode by which the inevitable is reached is effort.

In a democratic society like ours, relief must come through an aroused popular conscience that sears the conscience of the people's representatives.

The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.

In law also the emphasis makes the song.

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?

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.

Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand.

After all, advocates, including advocates for States, are like managers of pugilistic and election contestants, in that they have a propensity for claiming everything.

Judicial judgment must take deep account...of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.

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 Reminisces (1960)

The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards. And the effective administration of criminal justice hardly requires disregard of fair procedures imposed by law.

The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.

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.

I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.

Of Law and Life and Other Things: Papers and Address of Felix Frankfurter (1965)

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.

There is torture of mind as well as body; the will is as much affected by fear as by force. And there comes a point where this Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Felix Frankfurter (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.