Felix Frankfurter | Biography

Felix Frankfurter served as an attorney, law professor and justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Before joining the Court, Frankfurter had been a champion of liberal causes, including the accused robbers and murderers, Sacco and Vanzetti. Therefore, he surprised many observers with his conservative judicial views, based on the idea that judges must restrain themselves from trying to settle issues properly left to the legislative branch. Many noted legal scholars embraced his judicial philosophy, which has also shaped the outlook of many judges.

Frankfurter was born on November 15, 1882 in Vienna, Austria. His family immigrated to the United States when he was a young boy and settled in New York City. Frankfurter quickly mastered English and became an outstanding student. After earning degrees from New York's City College and Harvard Law School, Frankfurter practiced law in New York City. He was an assistant U.S. attorney for several years before returning to Harvard Law School in 1914 to become a professor.

Frankfurter became one of the most important law professors in the early twentieth century, dazzling his students with ideas and mentoring them on the benefits of government service. He used his friendships with prominent judges and justices to secure judicial clerkships for his best students.

Frankfurter established his liberal credentials early in his career. He joined the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) when it formed in 1920 and in the 1930s he provided legal advice to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). But he became nationally known for his crusade to save the lives of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants who were convicted of killing a guard and a paymaster from a Massachusetts shoe company in 1920. The Sacco and Vanzetti case proved controversial because many believed they had been convicted because of their radical political beliefs rather than because of any compelling physical evidence.

Troubled by the case, Frankfurter conducted an exhaustive investigation into the trial. He wrote an article in a national magazine that contended the jury had been allowed to hear inflammatory information about the defendants' anarchist beliefs that had nothing to do with the charged crimes. Frankfurter argued that his evidence had prejudiced the jury against the pair and led to an unfair result. His article was republished in 1927 as The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti. Despite his efforts, however, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed.

During the 1930s, Frankfurter served as an informal advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He helped shape many of Roosevelt's New Deal programs and actually wrote the Securities Act of 1933, which regulates the trading of stocks and bonds. Roosevelt shifted Frankfurter's career in 1939, when he named him to the Supreme Court. At the time, most commentators assumed he would carry his liberal political beliefs to the bench. However, Frankfurter sought to escape the labels of liberal or conservative through the practice of judicial self-restraint.

Judicial restraint is a theory of judging that attempts to limit the personal and subjective views of a judge in the decision-making process. Frankfurter believed a judge should follow traditional rules and standards of interpretation as well as prior decisions, or court precedents. Such restraint is inherently conservative, as the judge attempts to settle questions of law by making as little change as possible. This theory also restricts judges from making decisions on policy that should be left to the legislature. Armed with these beliefs, Frankfurter joined a Court that was beginning to move in the opposite direction, thus setting up several decades of internal friction on the Court.

Frankfurter tended to uphold laws based on judicial restraint, even if they appeared to be crude and heavy-handed. For example, in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586, 60 S.Ct. 1010, 84 L.Ed.23d 1375 (1940), he wrote the majority opinion that upheld the expulsion of students who refused to salute the American Flag. He concluded that the state legislature should be permitted to coerce children because the First Amendment did not offer protection.

One of Frankfurter's most important criminal opinions is found in Rochin v. California, 342 U.S. 165, 72 S.Ct. 205, L.Ed. 183 (1952). Frankfurter announced the "shock the conscience test" which prohibits conduct by state police officers that falls outside the standards of civilized decency. In this case, the police had forcibly pumped the stomach of the accused to recover illegal drug capsules. Frankfurter reasoned that to permit the use of such capsules as evidence under the circumstances would "afford brutality the cloak of law." The officers' conduct "shocks the conscience," offending even those with "hardened sensibilities. They are methods too close to the rack and screw to permit of constitutional differentiation." The Court reversed Rochin's conviction because the stomach pumping his due process rights.

Frankfurter retired from the Court in 1962 and died on February 22, 1965 in Washington, D.C.