Felix Frankfurter
In 1963, Felix Frankfurter received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a recognition that arrived near the end of a career spanning several decades in American law and public life.
Born in Vienna on 15 November 1882, Frankfurter later became a U.S. citizen. He studied at the City College of New York before going on to Harvard Law School. He worked as a lawyer, jurist, and judge, and his roles also extended into politics, making him a figure who moved across more than one area of American public life. He used the English language throughout his career. He died on 22 February 1965 in Washington, D.C., at the age of eighty-two.
Alongside the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Frankfurter also received the American Bar Association Medal. The two awards together mark a career that drew recognition from both government and the legal profession. His education at the City College of New York and then at Harvard Law School provided the foundation for the work he carried out as a lawyer, jurist, judge, and politician across his professional life.
Quotes by Felix Frankfurter
Felix Frankfurter's insights on:
I came into the world a Jew, and although I did not live my life entirely as a Jew, I think it is fitting that I should leave as a Jew. I don't want to turn my back on a great and noble heritage.
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.
For the highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one’s personal pulls and one’s private views to the law of which we are all guaradians – those impersonal convictions that made a society a civilized community, and not the victims of personal rule.
Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that’s all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.
Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation’s resources and talents.
While it is not always profitable to analogize fact to fiction, La Fontaine’s fable of the crow, the cheese, and the fox demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between holding a piece of cheese in the beak and putting it in the stomach.
In the first place, lawyers better remember they are human beings, and a human being who hasn’t his periods of doubts and distresses and disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one.
We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that we are perhaps in danger of forgetting how much blood it cost to establish the Bill of Rights.