Felix Frankfurter

Felix Frankfurter
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
In office January 30 1939 – August 28 1962
Nominated by	Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Preceded by	Benjamin N. Cardozo
Succeeded by	Arthur Goldberg

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

Early life

Frankfurter was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1882. At the age of twelve, he immigrated with his family to the United States and grew up on New York City's Lower East Side. Initially not speaking any English, he excelled at his studies at The Cooper Union and City College of New York.<refname=vile264Vile 2003, p. 264</ref> 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.<refname=vile264/>

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.

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. Following the arrest of suspected communist radicals in 1919 and 1920 during the Palmer raids, Frankfurter, together with other prominent lawyers including Zechariah Chafee signed an ACLU report which condemned the "utterly illegal acts committed by those changed with the highest duty of enforcing the laws" including police brutality, prolonged detention without access to lawyers, and violations of due process in court. 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."

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 should not interpret the fundamental law, the constitution, in such a way as to impose sharp limits upon the authority of the legislative and executive branches. He also usually refused to apply the federal Constitution to the states. In the case of Irvin v. Dowd, Frankfurter would state what was for him a frequent theme: "The federal judiciary has no power to sit in judgment upon a determination of a state court... Something that thus goes to the very structure of our federal system in its distribution of power between the United States and the state is not a mere bit of red tape to be cut, on the assumption that this Court has general discretion to see justice done..."

In his judicial restraint 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 did not "shock the conscience." Frankfurter was particularly well known as a scholar of civil procedure.

Justice Frankfurter was in his time the leader of the conservative faction of the Supreme Court; he would for many years feud with liberals like Justices Black and Douglas. In the apportionment case of Baker v. Carr, for example, Frankfurter's position was that the federal courts did not have the right to tell sovereign state governments how to apportion their legislatures; he thought the Supreme Court should not get involved in political questions, whether federal or local. Frankfurter's view had won out in the 1946 case preceding Baker, Colegrove v. Green - there, a 4-3 majority said the federal courts had no right to become involved in state politics, no matter how unequal district populations had become. However, the Baker case would settle the matter - the drawing of state legislative districts was within the purview of federal judges, despite Frankfurter's warnings that the Court should avoid entering "the political thicket."

Frankfurter saw justices with ideas different from his own as part of a more liberal "Axis" - these opponents were chiefly Justices Black and Douglas, but would also include Murphy and Rutledge; the group would for years oppose Frankfurter's judicially-restrained ideology. Douglas, Murphy, and then Rutledge were the first justices to agree with Hugo Black's notion that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights protection into it; this view would later become law. For his part, Frankfurter would assert that Black's incorporation theory would usurp state control over criminal justice by limiting states' development of new interpretations of criminal due process.

Frankfurter demanded that the opinion in 1955's Brown v. Board of Education II order desegregation with the (somewhat contradictory) phrase of "all deliberate speed". The phrase gave the South an excuse to defy the law of the land. For fifteen years, schools in the South remained segregated, until the Supreme Court's opinion in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education. There, the Court would write that "The obligation of every school district is to terminate dual school systems at once and to operate now and hereafter only unitary schools."

Frankfurter was hands-off in the area of business. In the 1956 government case against du Pont, started because du Pont seemed to have maneuvered its way into a preferential relationship with GM, Frankfurter refused to find a conspiracy, and said the Court had no right to interfere with the progress of business. Here again, Frankfurter opposed the views of Justices Warren, Black, Douglas, and Brennan (though Frankfurter lost 4-3).

Later in his career, Frankfurter's judicial restraint philosophy frequently put him on the dissenting side of ground-breaking decisions to end discrimination taken by the Warren court. However, Frankfurter joined the Court's unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which prohibited segregation in public schools. For the October 1948 Supreme Court Term, Frankfurter hired African American William Thaddeus Coleman as a law clerk.

Throughout his career on the court, Frankfurter was a large influence on many justices, such as Clark, Burton, Whittaker, and Minton. He generally attempted to influence any new justice coming in, though he managed to repel away Justice Brennan - who had voted with Frankfurter half the time in his first year, but then became a solid vote against him after Frankfurter's attempts at inculcation.

Frankfurter encouraged the Morgenthau Plan against Germany in World War II.

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.

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 had 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 was not 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."
• "The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes."

References

• Ball, Howard (2006), Cold Steel Warrior, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-507814-4.
• Frank, John P. (2006), Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel (ed.), The Justices of the United States Supreme Court: Their Lives and Major Opinions, Chelsea House Publishers, ISBN 978-0791013779.
• Hockett, Jeffry D (1996), New Deal Justice: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Hugo L. Black, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert H. Jackson, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, ISBN 0847682102.
• Carrington, Paul (1999), Stewards of Democracy: Law as Public Profession, New York: Basic Books, ISBN 978-0813368320.
• Dworkin, Ronald (1996), Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0198264705.
• Gunther, Gerald (1994), Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge, New York: Knopf, ISBN 978-0394588070.
• Irons, Peter (1999), A People's History of the Supreme Court, New York: Viking Penguin, ISBN 978-0670870066.
• Stone, Geoffrey R. (2004), Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism, New York: Norton., ISBN 978-0393058802.
• Vile, John R., ed. (2003), Great American Judges: An Encyclopedia, vol. 1, Santa Barbara: ABC–CLIO, ISBN 978-1576079898.
• White, G. Edward (2007), The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges (3rd ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0195139624.

External links

• "The Felix Frankfurter Papers". Lexis Nexis. Retrieved 2006-05-11.
• Felix Frankfurter's Gravesite
• September 27, 2006 Epoch Times Editorial on Harry Wu (quotation referring to Jan Karski and Felix Frankfurter: When Jan Karski disclosed the message of Nazis' slaughtering of the Jews, the U.S. Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter's response to a Polish diplomat was, "Mr. Ambassador, I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a difference.")
• Oyez: U.S. Supreme Court media on Felix Frankfurter