Felix Frankfurter

Justice Frankfurter

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

Early life

He was born in Vienna to the wife of a Jewish merchant. At the age of twelve, Felix and his family emigrated to the United States. After graduating from City College of New York, in 1902 Frankfurter entered Harvard Law School where he was 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 Taft appointed Stimson as his Secretary of War and Stimson appointed Frankfurter as law officer of the Bureau of Insular Affairs.

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 newspapers for the month of January 1919, using column inch counts. 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 leapt to 6642 inches. This was in spite the fact that the number of crimes reported had only increased 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 responded from the police and the city authorities. These agencies wishing to retain public support, complied, 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 The Business of the Supreme Court (1927), Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court (1938), The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (1954) 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.

Supreme Court

On January 5, 1939, President Franklin Delano 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 often cited Justice Holmes, whom he revered, in his opinions. In practice this meant that he was in general willing to uphold the actions of those branches against constitutional challenges so long as they did not "shock the conscience". 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.

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.

Trivia

Frankfurter is one of two Supreme Court justices to share a name with a food item (the other is Warren E. Burger). This fact was featured on a jaywalking segment of The Tonight Show and also in an episode of The Simpsons.

External links

• "The Felix Frankfurter Papers". Lexis Nexis. Retrieved 2006-05-11.
• Felix Frankfurter's Gravesite