Felix Frankfurter
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| Felix Frankfurter | |
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| In office January 30, 1939 – August 28, 1962 |
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| Nominated by | Franklin Delano Roosevelt |
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| Preceded by | Benjamin N. Cardozo |
| Succeeded by | Arthur Goldberg |
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| Born | November 15, 1882 Vienna, Austria |
| Died | February 22, 1965 (aged 82) Washington, D.C. |
| Religion | Jewish |
Felix Frankfurter (November 15, 1882 – February 22, 1965) was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
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[edit] Early life
Frankfurter was born to a Jewish family 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.
[edit] 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.[1]
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.
[edit] 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.[2][3] 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."
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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. 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 did not "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 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.
Frankfurter encouraged the Morgenthau Plan against Germany in World War II.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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."[4]
[edit] Memorable Quotes
- "In a democracy, the highest office is the office of citizen."
[edit] Notes
- ^ Time Magazine, June 20, 1938
- ^ Jensen, Klaus Bruhn (May 10, 2002). A Handbook of Media and Communication Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies. UK: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-22588-4. p. 45–46
- ^ Pound, Roscoe; Felix Frankfurter (1922). Criminal Justice in Cleveland. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Foundation. p. 546
- ^ Michael Lariens on Fred Vinson.
[edit] Bibliography and further reading
- Frank, John P., The Justices of the United States Supreme Court: Their Lives and Major Opinions (Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel, editors) (Chelsea House Publishers: 1995) ISBN 0791013774, ISBN 978-0791013779
- Hockett, Jeffrey D. (1996). New Deal Justice: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Hugo L. Black, Felix Frankfurther, and Robert H. Jackson. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 0847682102 ISBN 9780847682102
[edit] External links
- The Felix Frankfurter Papers. Lexis Nexis. Retrieved on 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
| Legal offices | ||
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| Preceded by Benjamin N. Cardozo |
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States January 30, 1939–August 28, 1962 |
Succeeded by Arthur Goldberg |
