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A Court Which Yields To The Popular Will Thereby Licenses Itself To Practice Despotism, For There Can Be No Assurance That It Will Not, On Another Occasion, Indulge Its Own Will.

-Felix Frankfurter

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A Court Which Yields

Felix Frankfurter

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A Court Which Yields To The Popular Will Thereby Licenses Itself To Practice Despotism, For There Can Be No Assurance That It Will Not, On Another Occasion, Indulge Its Own Will.

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It Is Hostile To A Democratic System To Involve The Judiciary In The Politics Of The People.

Litigation Is The Pursuit Of Practical Ends, Not A Game Of Chess.

A Phrase Begins Life As A Literary Expression; Its Felicity Leads To Its Lazy Repetition, And Repetition Soon Establishes It As A Legal Formula, Undiscriminatingly Used To Express Different And Sometimes Contradictory Ideas.

Old Age And Sickness Bring Out The Essential Characteristics Of A Man.

It Would Be A Stultification Of The Responsibility Which The Course Of Constitutional History Has Cast Upon This Court To Hold That In Order To Convict A Man The Police Cannot Extract By Force What Is In His Mind, But Can Extract What Is In His Stomach.

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.

The Words Of The Constitution... Are So Unrestricted By Their Intrinsic Meaning Or By Their History Or By Tradition Or By Prior Decisions That They Leave The Individual Justice Free, If Indeed They Do Not Compel Him, To Gather Meaning Not From Reading The Constitution But From Reading Life.

To Some Lawyers, All Facts Are Created Equal.

I Don’t Like A Man To Be Too Efficient. He’s Likely To Be Not Human Enough.

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.

It Has Not Been Unknown That Judges Persist In Error To Avoid Giving The Appearance Of Weakness And Vacillation.

One Is Entitled To Say Without Qualification That The Correlation Between Prior Judicial Experience And Fitness For The Supreme Court Is Zero.

Convictions Following The Admission Into Evidence Of Confessions Which Are Involuntary, I.e., The Product Of Coercion, Either Physical Or Psychological, Cannot Stand. This Is So Not Because Such Confessions Are Unlikely To Be True But Because The Methods Used To Extract Them Offend An Underlying Principle In The Enforcement Of Our Criminal Law: That Ours Is An Accusatorial, And Not An Inquisitorial, System - A System In Which The State Must Establish Guilt By Evidence Independently And Freely Secured, And May Not, By Coercion, Prove Its Charges Against An Accused Out Of His Own Mouth.

Judicial Judgment Must Take Deep Account...of The Day Before Yesterday In Order That Yesterday May Not Paralyze Today.

The Ultimate Touchstone Of Constitutionality Is The Constitution Itself, And Not What We Have Said About It.

Libertarian Party

Gratitude Is One Of The Least Articulate Of The Emotions, Especially When It Is Deep. I Can Express With Very Limited Adequacy The Passionate Devotion To This Land That Possesses Millions Of Our People, Born, Like Myself, Under Other Skies, For The Privilege That That This County Has Bestowed In Allowing Them To Partake Of Its Fellowship.

It Is A Fair Summary Of History To Say That The Safeguards Of Liberty Have Been Forged In Controversies Involving Not Very Nice People.

Congress Is, After All, Not A Body Of Laymen Unfamiliar With The Commonplaces Of Our Law. This Legislation Was The Formulation Of The Two Judiciary Committees, All Of Whom Are Lawyers, And The Congress Is Predominately A Lawyers' Body.

Ambiguity Lurks In Generality, And May Thus Become An Instrument Of Severity.

The Eternal Struggle In The Law Between Constancy And Change Is Largely A Struggle Between History And Reason, Between Past Reason And Present Needs.

Answers Are Not Obtained By Putting The Wrong Question And Thereby Begging The Real One.

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.

The Indispensible Judicial Requisite Is Intellectual Humility.

Intellectual Humility

No Office In The Land Is More Important Than That Of Being A Citizen.

Morals Are Three-quarters Manners.

Time And Experience Have Forcefully Taught That The Power To Inspect Dwelling Places, Either As A Matter Of Systematic Area-by-area Search Or, As Here, To Treat A Specific Problem, Is Of Indispensable Importance In The Maintenance Of Community Health; A Power That Would Be Greatly Hobbled By The Blanket Requirement Of The Safeguards Necessary For A Search Of Evidence Of Criminal Acts.

Certainly The Affirmative Pursuit Of One's Convictions About The Ultimate Mystery Of The Universe And Man's Relation To It Is Placed Beyond The Reach Of Law. Government May Not Interfere With Organized Or Individual Expressions Of Belief Or Disbelief. Propagation Of Belief - Or Even Of Disbelief - In The Supernatural Is Protected, Whether In Church Or Chapel, Mosque Or Synagogue, Tabernacle Or Meeting-house.

A Court Which Yields To The Popular Will Thereby Licenses Itself To Practice Despotism, For There Can Be No Assurance That It Will Not, On Another Occasion, Indulge Its Own Will.

A License Cannot Be Revoked Because A Man Is Red-headed Or Because He Was Divorced, Except For A Calling, If Such There Be, For Which Red-headedness Or An Unbroken Marriage May Have Some Rational Bearing. If A State Licensing Agency Lays Bare Its Arbitrary Action, Or If The State Law Explicitly Allows It To Act Arbitrarily, That Is Precisely The Kind Of State Action Which The Due Process Clause Forbids.

The Line Must Follow Some Direction Of Policy, Whether Rooted In Logic Or Experience. Lines Should Not Be Drawn Simply For The Sake Of Drawing Lines.

It Is Easy To Make Light Of Insistence On Scrupulous Regard For The Safeguards Of Civil Liberties When Invoked On Behalf Of The Unworthy. It Is Too Easy. History Bears Testimony That By Such Disregard Are The Rights Of Liberty Extinguished, Heedlessly At First, Then Stealthily, And Brazenly In The End.

The State Insists That, By Thus Quarantining The General Reading Public Against Books Not Too Rugged For Grown Men And Women In Order To Shield Juvenile Innocence, It Is Exercising Its Power To Promote The General Welfare. Surely This Is To Burn The House To Roast The Pig...the Incidence Of This Enactment Is To Reduce The Adult Population Of Michigan To Reading Only What Is Fit For Children.

It Simply Is Not True That War Never Settles Anything.

There Is No Inevitability In History Except As Men Make It.

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In Law Also The Emphasis Makes The Song.

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.

Of Compelling Consideration Is The Fact That Words Acquire Scope And Function From The History Of Events Which They Summarize.

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.

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I Know Of No Title That I Deem More Honorable Than That Of Professor Of The Harvard Law School.

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Ours Is An Accusatorial, And Not An Inquisitorial, System - A System In Which The State Must Establish Guilt By Evidence Independently And Freely Secured, And May Not, By Coercion, Prove Its Charge Against An Accused Out Of His Own Mouth.

Without A Free Press There Can Be No Free Society. That Is Axiomatic. However, Freedom Of The Press Is Not An End In Itself But A Means To The End Of A Free Society. The Scope And Nature Of The Constitutional Guarantee Of The Freedom Of The Press Are To Be Viewed And Applied In That Light.

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All Our Work, Our Whole Life Is A Matter Of Semantics, Because Words Are The Tools With Which We Work, The Material Out Of Which Laws Are Made, Out Of Which The Constitution Was Written. Everything Depends On Our Understanding Of Them.

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What Becomes Decisive To A Justice's Functioning On The Court In The Large Area Within Which His Individuality Moves Is His General Attitude Toward Law, The Habits Of The Mind That He Has Formed Or Is Capable Of Unforming, His Capacity For Detachment, His Temperament Or Training For Putting His Passion Behind His Judgment Instead Of In Front Of It. The Attitudes And Qualities Which I Am Groping To Characterize Are Ingredients Of What Compendiously Might Be Called Dominating Humility.

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If One Man Can Be Allowed To Determine For Himself What Is Law, Every Man Can. That Means First Chaos, Then Tyranny. Legal Process Is An Essential Part Of The Democratic Process.

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Professionalism

The History Of Liberty Has Largely Been The History Of The Observance Of Procedural Safeguards.

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Freedom Of Speech

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.

Is That Which Was Deemed To Be Of So Fundamental A Nature As To Be Written Into The Constitution To Endure For All Times To Be The Sport Of Shifting Winds Of Doctrine?

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