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Felix Frankfurter (November 15, 1882 – February 22, 1965) was an Austrian-American lawyer, professor, and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Frankfurter served on the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1962 and was a noted advocate of judicial restraint in the judgments of the Court.

Frankfurter was born in Vienna, Austria, and immigrated to New York City at the age of 12. After graduating from Harvard Law School, Frankfurter worked for Henry L. Stimson, the U.S. Secretary of War. During World War I, Frankfurter served as Judge Advocate General. After the war, he helped found the American Civil Liberties Union and returned to his position as professor at Harvard Law School. He became a friend and adviser of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him to fill the Supreme Court vacancy caused by the death of Benjamin N. Cardozo. Although Frankfurter's personal political views were strongly liberal, his experience with the Supreme Court's Lochner era in which conservative justices struck down economic regulations, led him to oppose judicial intervention and his jurisprudence was generally conservative.

Frankfurter served on the Court until his retirement in 1962, and was succeeded by Arthur Goldberg. Frankfurter wrote the Court's majority opinions in cases such as Minersville School District v. Gobitis, Gomillion v. Lightfoot, and Beauharnais v. Illinois. He wrote dissenting opinions in notable cases such as Baker v. Carr, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, Glasser v. United States, and Trop v. Dulles.

Early life and education

Frankfurter was born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family on November 15, 1882, in Vienna, then part of Austria-Hungary. He was the third of six children of Leopold Frankfurter, a merchant, and Emma (Winter) Frankfurter. His uncle, Solomon Frankfurter, was head librarian at the Vienna University Library. Frankfurter's forebears had been rabbis for generations. In 1894, twelve-year-old Frankfurter and his family immigrated to the United States, settling in New York City's Lower East Side, a dense center of immigrants. Frankfurter attended P.S. 25 and Townsend Harris High School, where he excelled at his studies and enjoyed playing chess and shooting craps on the street. He spent many hours reading at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and attending political lectures, usually on subjects such as trade unionism, socialism, and communism.

After graduating in 1902 from City College of New York, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, Frankfurter worked for the Tenement House Department of New York City to raise money for law school. He applied successfully to Harvard Law School, where he excelled academically and socially. He became lifelong friends with Walter Lippmann and Horace Kallen, became an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and graduated first in his class with one of the best academic records since Louis Brandeis.

Early career

Frankfurter's legal career began when he joined the New York law firm of Hornblower, Byrne, Miller & Potter in 1906. In the same year, he was hired as the assistant to Henry Stimson, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. During this period, Frankfurter read Herbert Croly's book The Promise of American Life, and became a supporter of the New Nationalism and of Theodore Roosevelt. In 1911, President William Howard Taft appointed Stimson as his Secretary of War, and Stimson appointed Frankfurter as law officer of the Bureau of Insular Affairs. Frankfurter worked directly for Stimson as his assistant and confidant. His government position restricted his ability to publicly voice his Progressive views, though he expressed his opinions privately to friends such as Judge Learned Hand.[14] In 1912 Frankfurter supported the Bull Moose campaign to return Roosevelt to the presidency, and was bitterly disappointed when Woodrow Wilson was elected. He became increasingly disillusioned with the established parties, and described himself as "politically homeless"

Retirement and death

Frankfurter retired in 1962 after suffering a stroke and was succeeded by Arthur Goldberg.He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Felix Frankfurter died from congestive heart failure in 1965 at the age of 82. His remains are interred in the Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Legacy

There are two extensive collections of Frankfurter's papers: one at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress and the other at Harvard University. Both are fully open for research and have been distributed to other libraries on microfilm. However, in 1972 it was discovered that more than a thousand pages of his archives, including his correspondence with Lyndon B. Johnson and others, had been stolen from the Library of Congress; the crime remains unsolved and the perpetrator and motive are unknown.

A chapter of the international youth-led fraternal organization for Jewish teenagers Aleph Zadik Aleph in Scottsdale, Arizona, is named in his honor.

A chapter of the international legal fraternal organization Phi Alpha Delta at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts, is named in his honor.

Courtesy-wikipedia
- Felix Frankfurter

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