Felix Frankfurter

Felix Frankfurter left Vienna at 12, arriving on New York's Lower East Side in 1894 speaking no English and picking it up fast enough that within a few years he was attending Cooper Union's free public lectures for entertainment. His father sold linens; nobody in the family had gone to college. Frankfurter got through City College of New York on scholarship and talked his way into Harvard Law School, where he graduated first in his class and edited the Law Review, a rise unusual enough that Boston society noticed the immigrant surname before it noticed the record behind it. He went straight from law school into the US Attorney's office under Henry Stimson, the start of a career built on proximity to government power rather than private practice.

Frankfurter spent two decades before the Court as Washington's favorite outside adviser, helping found the American Civil Liberties Union after the 1919 and 1920 Palmer Raids, defending accused radicals, and investigating labor unrest for Woodrow Wilson's government, work that got him branded 'the most dangerous man in the United States' by a young J. Edgar Hoover. He argued for a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti in a widely read 1927 book. Franklin Roosevelt put him on the Supreme Court in 1939, where he served 23 years as the loudest advocate of judicial restraint on a bench that increasingly wanted to use its power rather than limit it. He wrote 247 majority opinions and 251 dissents, including the 'all deliberate speed' language in the second Brown v. Board ruling.

The lawyer who helped found the ACLU became a justice who, in 1940, wrote the Court's opinion stripping Jehovah's Witness schoolchildren of the right to refuse the flag salute, a ruling that preceded hundreds of violent attacks on Witnesses nationwide and that the Court itself reversed three years later, over Frankfurter's furious dissent. He supported desegregation in Brown but supplied the 'all deliberate speed' phrase for enforcing it, language southern school boards used to stall for 15 years. In 1960, with a Harvard dean's personal recommendation in hand, he turned down Ruth Bader Ginsburg for a clerkship because she was a woman. He fought so bitterly with fellow justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas that Black once said he thought Frankfurter was about to hit him, and Chief Justice Earl Warren complained that all Frankfurter ever did was talk.

A stroke ended Frankfurter's tenure in 1962; he died three years later, in February 1965. His seat had already passed to Arthur Goldberg, in what insiders called the Court's informal 'Jewish seat,' later held by Abe Fortas and, decades on, by Stephen Breyer. The judicial-restraint doctrine he spent 23 years defending did not survive him as a going concern — the Warren Court he fought moved the other way on civil rights and criminal procedure, and stayed there. The legal historian Michael Parrish's later verdict, that Frankfurter became 'uncoupled from the locomotive of history,' reflects where most legal scholars have since settled: brilliant before the bench, and largely overtaken on it.

Felix Frankfurter's life against the full span of the corpus.

• American Civil Liberties Union company
  Co-founded after the Palmer Raids 1920
• The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti book
  Argued the convictions rested on anti-immigrant and anti-radical prejudice 1927
• Minersville School District v. Gobitis case
  Majority opinion upholding a mandatory flag salute; overturned three years later 1940
• Brown v. Board of Education II case
  Supplied the 'all deliberate speed' enforcement language 1955
• Felix Frankfurter Reminisces book
  Oral-history memoir recorded with historian Harlan Phillips 1960

• November 15, 1882 aged 0 Born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary
• 1894 aged ~12 Immigrates with his family to New York's Lower East Side Arrived at 12 speaking no English.
• 1902 aged ~20 Graduates City College of New York
• 1906 aged ~24 Graduates first in his class at Harvard Law School
• 1920 aged ~38 Helps found the American Civil Liberties Union
• 1927 aged ~45 Publishes a book arguing for a new Sacco and Vanzetti trial
• January 30, 1939 aged 56 Sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt after two days of Senate testimony, only the second nominee ever required to testify.
• August 28, 1962 aged 79 Retires from the Court after a stroke
• February 22, 1965 aged 82 Dies of congestive heart failure at 82

• Louis Brandeis 1856–1941
  Justice and reform lawyer who advanced privacy, free speech, and progressive regulation. mentor
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 1841–1935
  Justice whose pragmatic jurisprudence and free-speech opinions deeply influenced American law. subject of his book
• Earl Warren 1891–1974
  Chief justice whose Court transformed civil rights, voting, representation, and criminal procedure. ideological rival
• Hugo Black 1886–1971
  Justice who championed strong First Amendment protections and incorporation of the Bill of Rights. feuded with
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020
  Supreme Court Justice whose advocacy for gender equality made her a cultural icon. rejected for a clerkship