A Supreme Court Justice Who Believes Strongly In Judicial

Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965) championed civil rights during 23 years as a justice on the Supreme Court, but he frequently voted to limit civil liberties, believing that government had a duty to protect itself and the public from assault and that the Court should exercise judicial restraint to promote democratic processes.

Frankfurter was an immigrant who taught at Harvard Law School

Born in Vienna, Austria, Frankfurter arrived in New York City with his family in 1894, knowing no English. They lived in a Jewish ghetto on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where his father became a door-to-door salesman. Adapting quickly to his adopted nation and its language, Frankfurter entered City College of New York in 1897 as part of a program that allowed him to finish high school and to earn a college degree. He graduated magna cum laude in 1902 and briefly attended New York Law School. He then transferred to Harvard University, became editor of the Harvard Law Review, and graduated at the top of his class in 1906.

After a stint in private practice, Frankfurter became an assistant U.S. attorney in New York under Theodore Roosevelt appointee Henry L. Stimson. In 1911 Stimson was appointed secretary of war by President William Howard Taft; Frankfurter became counsel to the Bureau of Insular Affairs. In 1914 Frankfurter accepted a position teaching at Harvard Law School.

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Throughout his tenure at Harvard, Frankfurter was known nationally as the consummate teacher and scholar, an outspoken advocate of liberal causes, as well as a skilled participant in public affairs. President Woodrow Wilson appointed him as a judge advocate to investigate labor unrest, and then as counsel to the Mediation Commission. He also served as a Zionist delegate to the Versailles Peace Conference, and he urged Wilson to incorporate the Balfour Declaration into the treaty.

Frankfurter helped start the ACLU

In 1920 Frankfurter helped to organize the American Civil Liberties Union. Two years later, in 1922, he, along with Roscoe Pound, published Criminal Justice in Cleveland, a study of crime reporting in Cleveland newspapers. The study concluded that the recent crime wave in Cleveland was a fiction created by the press that resulted in inflated punishments and gross miscarriages of justice.

His vigorous criticism of the conviction and 1927 execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the anarchists accused of bank robbery and murder in Braintree, Mass., resulted in another book, The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (1927). In all, Frankfurter authored or edited 12 books and many scholarly articles for law journals, and he frequently contributed articles to the New Republic, which he helped to found.

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