Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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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

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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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M r - ' I', Felix Frankfurter - The Teacher H V 'X By dai 5? I PY x HENRY M. HART ng:-A. Professor of Law 1. V - Harvard University f up , ,IA lli. -f ull, . e . if V 'w 1 - Lf gh V HE span of Felix Frankfurtefs teaching in this School fell only a few X K months short of a quarter of a century, broken by two years of war-time CBE service in Washington and later by a year's leave of absence at Oxford. 'A' LJ During that period his presence here made a major dilference, year after year, in the lives of large numbers of men who became his students. Through his students and otherwise, his thinking about problems of law and of government came to make a difference in the thoughts not only of this and other law schools but of the country at large. When he left the School he had long since become, in a full and lasting sense, a leader and guide of national opinion. Rarely has the function of a teacher been more nobly fuliilled- with equal effectiveness at the center, in the minds and lives of students, and at the periphery, in the life and thought of the nation. I am given the diliicult task of trying to suggest, to a succeeding generation in the School, something of how and why this happened. Many of Mr. Frankfurter's qualities as a teacher were his because they were his, rather than because he made them so. Vitality was one of them, he himself is a prime example of his own occasional references to the importance of sheer horse- power in human affairs. Warm, out-going, intense interest in other human beings was another. Such an interest could never be confined to students as prospective lawyersg it awoke a response which correspondingly w'as unconfined. Humor, under- standing, gaiety, lightning quickness of wit and wits: everyone who ever sat in his Iliil