Constitution Quotes by Felix Frankfurter

11 Constitution quotes by Felix Frankfurter

All Constitution quotes Felix Frankfurter’s page

Frankfurter’s remarks on the document are concise, reflecting his belief in flexible interpretation and the role of the courts. Eleven quotes offer a succinct glimpse of his legal reasoning.

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No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.

Felix Frankfurter

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Decisions of this Court do not have intrinsic authority

Felix Frankfurter

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To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.

Felix Frankfurter

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It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.

Felix Frankfurter

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The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it.

Felix Frankfurter

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One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.

Felix Frankfurter

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As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter…

Felix Frankfurter

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One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed…

Felix Frankfurter

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Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for…

Felix Frankfurter

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The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior…

Felix Frankfurter

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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…

Felix Frankfurter

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Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but…

Felix Frankfurter

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It is important not to give the appearance of a predisposed mind. And it is more important not to let the mind become predisposed.

Felix Frankfurter

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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…

Felix Frankfurter

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The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to…

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,…

Felix Frankfurter

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It would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of 'laws' to what is found written on the statute books, and…

Felix Frankfurter

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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…

Felix Frankfurter

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We forget that the most successful statesmen have been professionals. Lincoln was a professional politician.

Felix Frankfurter

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Anybody can decide a question if only a single principle is in controversy.

Felix Frankfurter

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The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.

Felix Frankfurter

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The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.

Felix Frankfurter

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We recognize that stare decisis embodies an important social policy that represents an element of continuity in law and is rooted in the psychological…

Felix Frankfurter

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