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One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.

Felix Frankfurter

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Felix Frankfurter
Age: 82 †
Born: 1882
Born: November 15
Died: 1965
Died: February 22
Former Associate Justice Of The Supreme Court Of The United States
Judge
Lawyer
Politician
Vienna
Austria
Supreme
Qualification
Court
Correlation
Experience
Qualifications
Without
Prior
Judicial
Fitness
Entitled
Zero

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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
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I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough.
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Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.
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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
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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 disappointments must be a cabbage, not a human being. That is number one.
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It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.
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Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
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Judicial judgment must take deep account...of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.
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If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors.
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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
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It would be a stultification of the responsibility which the course of constitutional history has cast upon this Court to hold that in order to convict a man the police cannot extract by force what is in his mind, but can extract what is in his stomach.
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No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
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While it is not always profitable to analogize fact to fiction, La Fontaine's fable of the crow, the cheese, and the fox demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between holding a piece of cheese in the beak and putting it in the stomach.
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Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.
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There is torture of mind as well as body the will is as much affected by fear as by force. And there comes a point where this Court should not be ignorant as judges of what we know as men.
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Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.
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We recognize that stare decisis embodies an important social policy that represents an element of continuity in law and is rooted in the psychological need to satisfy reasonable expectations.
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Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.
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