Harvard Law School - Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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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

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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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classes knows of these and other qualities. They explain a great deal of the friend- ship and devotion which it has been his gift so frequently to inspire. But they do not seem to me to tell the whole story. Mr. Frankfurter taught law, in Holmes' phrase, in the grand manner, and I venture to think that in this more was involved than the lmfolding alone of a vivid, provocative, generous personality. To teach law in the grand manner, for Mr. Frankfurter, was to teach it in its relations to life. To say this is easy. To do it requires not merely talent but will, the will to make a choice between the important and the unimportant, the steady effort to see and insist upon what is important. Such a conception of teaching law assumes a deliberate and continuous absorption in how' law works-the how of the process as well as of the result. It assumes caring about how it works, caring about life and caring about law as a way of life. It assumes, to put it at its narrowest, a persisting habit, in thinking about legal questions, of looking beyond the end of your nose-the end of the noses of so many lawyers, students and even law teachers being, of course, simply the doctrine of the particular case. It seems to me that it was Mr. F rankfurter's habit of doing that which gave to his teaching so much fresh- ness and stimulation and kept both him and his classes so intensely interested in what they were doing. The trinity of courses which Mr. Frankfurter gave in later years were Public Utilities, Administrative Law, and Federal Jurisdiction. To those who associate him with those subjects it may seem incongruous that he emerged from his undergraduate work as, among other things, an enthusiastic property lawyer and assistant of John Chipman Cray, and that his earlier teaching included such diversities as Municipal Corporations, Partnerships, Criminal Law and Restraint of Trade. But the incon- gruity is only apparent. His insights are fruitful for the study of private no less than of public law, and one may regret that his recent occasional half-serious oifers to teach Torts or Contracts were never taken up. The three courses of recent years were characteristically of his own creation, and each bore the unmistakable imprint of his special conception of the function of teaching. His was the pioneer effort to explore systematically the body of the Interstate Commerce Acts, he made it a study not merely of those Acts but of the legislative and administrative processes as such, in the setting of an intractable E141