Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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Holmes, Cardozo and Brandeis, JJ., has given him an historical background for his work as a justice of the Court which must be almost unrivalled in its history. Mr. Justice Frankfurter's relation to the Roosevelt administration has been of that close character which is invaluable in making the judge understand that the legal issues before the Court are also issues of statesmanship. It is no secret that, without holding any actual position in the administration, his advice has been eagerly sought on some of the vital problems with which the administration has had to deal. That so many of his former pupils hold pivotal posts under it is a tribute to the great infiuence he has exercised as a teacher. By the influence a wrong general public, Mr. Justice Frankfurter is regarded as likely to be a radical on the Supreme Court. It is perhaps permissible to suggest that this is approach to his philosophy of the judicial function. Trained by James Barr Ames and John Chipman Gray, deeply inifluenced by J. B. Thayer, Holmes, Brandeis and Cardozo, it is less with the doctrinal ends of the Court, than with the methods by which it limits its own function, that he has been most concerned. His effort has always been to persuade it to the realization that it is a road to creativeness as well as an obstacle to particular types of experiment, that its business is not the substitution of its own wisdom or discretion for that of the legislator or the admin- istrator. Knowing the problems of both from within, he has consistently urged that whatever the mental climate of the United States regards as reasonable should be held by the Court to be constitutional unless it unmistakably violates the plain mean- ing of the document of 1787. He has sought, like the two great predecessors in whose place he now' sits, to warn the Court against becoming the third, and final, chamber of the legislature. The essence of his own legal outlook, therefore, cannot be properly described as liberal or conservative. It is rather an insistence upon the duty of the Court, first to regard experiment with a wise tolerance, and second, not to make the issues it decides a restraint upon the future cases it may be called upon to determine. The influences that have played upon the formation of Mr. Justice Frankfurter have been varied. A friend may note that he owes much to the keen common sense of a remarkable mother. He has learned, too, a great deal from that enlargement of the intellectual horizons which necessarily comes to any able man who exchanges Illl

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His well-known report for that commission on the Mooney case was largely instru- mental in the commutation of Mooney's sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment. That report has been the basis of all subsequent investigations of the case, and may be said to have laid the foundations of the movement which led to Mooney's pardon by Governor Olson in 1939. Mr. Frankfurter returned to Harvard in 1919 with a secure national reputation. In the next twenty years, he has led a full life. His book, The Sacco-Vanzetti Case H9261 marked a decisive turning-point in the evolution of that tragic drama. He was active in the American Zionist movement. He played an important part in the Presidential campaigns of 1928 and 1932, and during President Roosevelt's terms of omce, as Governor of New' York, Mr. Frankfurter became his close adviser. Governor Ely of Massachusetts offered him a place on the Supreme Judicial Court of that State in 1932, but Professor Frankfurter refused it on the ground that he preferred to continue his teaching work at Harvard. In 1933, he w'as offered the Solicitor- Ceneralship of the United States by President Rooseveltg this great post, he also declined. In 1933-34, he was Eastman Professor at the University of Oxford, and the conferment upon him by that University of the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law in 1939 was generally acclaimed as a recognition of his remarkable success in that post. He has delivered the Dodge Lectures at Yale University CT he Public and Its Government, 19301 and the Weil Lectures at the University of North Carolina fThe Commerce Clause, 19371. His lectures on Mr. Justice Holmes were published in 1939 and are the best account, thus far published, of that great jurist's method. Mr. Frankfurter has also published standard volumes on the Labor Injlmction fwith Mr. Nathan Greene1 and on the Business of the Supreme Court fwith Dean James M. Landis1. He is the author of many articles in the Harvard and other law reviews. Few people have brought to the service of the Supreme Court an equipment so wide or so profound as Mr. Justice Frankfurter. He has been studying its problems all his adult life. He comes to them with not only the lawyer's training, but also with the administratoris special understanding of the horizons they create. The necessities of teaching-and he has been a great teacher-have enabled him also to see them fully in their juristic perspective. Long and intimate friendship with I101

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the limited opportunities of pre-war Vienna for the wider and ampler scope offered by the United States. To the cultural tradition of Europe, Mr. Justice Frankfurter has added the sense that the law of life is the need of constant adaptation to a rapidly changing world. He is a man of wide reading. But the opinion may be hazarded that life, rather than books, has shaped the main outlines of his thought. Having a genius for friendship, he has learned to glean the inner substance of the experience of friends. They have been as wide in their range as the ample variety of American life-statesmen, judges, professors, trade unionists, businessmen. He has had the power to make learning friendship, and friendship learning. The result is a mind as open as it is incisive. He has never been the servant of a particular doctrine, nor the disciple of any school. Few people have been, in the best sense, more funda- mentally American. His outlook and his career are alike a tribute to the capacity of America to breed in her children a love of her institutions and a passion for the fulfillment of the great ends for which they were brought into being. No man has more acutely realized that his rich experience has been made possible by the ideal of an America as the free heritage of the common peopleg none is more eager to pass on that heritage enlarged and deepened by the service it calls for from its citizens. London, England August 30, 1939 U21