Felix Frankfurter (November 15, 1882 – February 22, 1965) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1939 until 1962, advocating judicial restraint.
Born in Vienna, Frankfurter immigrated with his family to New York City at age 12. He graduated from Harvard Law School and worked for Henry L. Stimson, the U.S. Secretary of War. Frankfurter served as Judge Advocate General during World War I. Afterward, he returned to Harvard and helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. He later became a friend and adviser of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After Benjamin N. Cardozo died in 1938, Roosevelt nominated Frankfurter to the Supreme Court. Given his affiliations and alleged radicalism, the Senate confirmed Frankfurter's appointment only after its Judiciary Committee required him to testify in 1939, a practice that became routine in the 1950s.
His relations with colleagues were strained by ideological and personal differences, likely exacerbated by some antisemitism. His judicial restraint was first seen as relatively liberal, as conservative justices had used the derogation canon and plain meaning rule against Progressive economic legislation during the 1897–1937 Lochner era. It became seen as somewhat conservative in civil liberties dissents as the Court moved left. His dissent in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) refers to his minority-group background as immaterial and was prompted by the new majority's repudiation of Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940), in which he had penned the restrained majority opinion.
In 1948, he hired William Thaddeus Coleman Jr., the first black law clerk at the Court, though in 1960 Frankfurter declined to hire Ruth Bader Ginsburg, citing gender roles. In Brown II (1955), he suggested the phrase "all deliberate speed" to endorse gradual racial integration. He held that redistricting was nonjusticiable in Colegrove v. Green (1946) and Baker v. Carr (1962), and his majority opinion in Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960) only upheld review under the Fifteenth Amendment. Frankfurter's other decisions include the majority opinion in Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952) and dissents in Glasser v. United States (1942) and Trop v. Dulles (1958). He retired after a 1962 stroke, and was replaced with Arthur Goldberg.
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 father died in 1916. His mother died in January 1928 after a prolonged illness. 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.
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. In 1912 Frankfurter supported the Bull Moose campaign to return Roosevelt to the presidency but was bitterly disappointed when Woodrow Wilson was elected. He became increasingly disillusioned with the established parties, and described himself as "politically homeless".
Frankfurter's work in Washington had impressed the faculty at Harvard Law School, who used a donation from the financier Jacob Schiff to create a position for him there after Louis Brandeis suggested that Schiff do this. He taught mainly administrative law and occasionally criminal law. With fellow professor James M. Landis, he advocated judicial restraint in dealing with government misdeeds, including greater freedom for administrative agencies from judicial oversight. He also served as counsel for the National Consumers League, arguing for Progressive causes such as minimum wage and restricted work hours. He was involved in the early years of The New Republic magazine after its founding by Herbert Croly.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Frankfurter took a special leave from Harvard to be commissioned a major in the United States Army Reserve, where he supervised military courts-martial as a Judge Advocate General in 1917 and served as special assistant to the Secretary of War Newton D. Baker until 1918.
In September 1917, he was appointed counsel to a commission, the President's Mediation Committee, established by President Wilson to resolve major strikes threatening war production. Among the disturbances he investigated were the 1916 Preparedness Day Bombing in San Francisco, where he argued strongly that the radical leader Thomas Mooney had been framed and required a new trial. He also represented the Labor Department on the priorities board of the War Industries Board and examined the copper industry in Arizona. There, industry bosses solved industrial relations problems by having more than 1,000 strikers forcibly deported to New Mexico.
Frankfurter thus learned firsthand about labor politics and extremism, including anarchism, communism and revolutionary socialism. He came to sympathize with labor issues, arguing that "unsatisfactory, remediable social conditions, if unattended, give rise to radical movements far transcending the original impulse." His activities led the public to view him as a radical lawyer and supporter of radical principles. Former President Theodore Roosevelt accused him of being "engaged in excusing men precisely like the Bolsheviki in Russia".
As the war drew to a close, Frankfurter was among the nearly one hundred intellectuals who signed a statement of principles for the formation of the League of Free Nations Associations, intended to increase United States participation in international affairs.
Frankfurter was encouraged by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis to become more involved in Zionism. With Brandeis, he lobbied President Wilson to support the Balfour Declaration, a British government statement supporting the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In 1918, he participated in the founding conference of the American Jewish Congress in Philadelphia, creating a national democratic organization of Jewish leaders from all over the U.S. In 1919, Frankfurter served as a Zionist delegate to the Paris Peace Conference.
In 1919, Frankfurter married Marion Denman, a Smith College graduate and the daughter of a Congregational minister. They married after a long and difficult courtship, and against the wishes of his mother, who was disturbed by the prospect of her son marrying outside the Jewish faith. Frankfurter was a non-practicing Jew and regarded religion as "an accident of birth". Frankfurter was a domineering husband and Denman suffered from frail health. She suffered frequent mental breakdowns. The couple had no children.