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… — Felix Frankfurter Copy Share Image
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… — Felix Frankfurter Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
We forget that the most successful statesmen have been professionals. Lincoln was a professional politician. — Felix Frankfurter Copy Share Image
Anybody can decide a question if only a single principle is in controversy. — Felix Frankfurter Copy Share Image
The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals. — Felix Frankfurter Copy Share Image
The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind. — Felix Frankfurter Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
