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If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.

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
Men
Law
Legal
Process
Tyranny
Means
Allowed
Part
Chaos
Firsts
Determine
First
Essential
Mean
Essentials
Every
Democratic

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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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After all, advocates, including advocates for States, are like managers of pugilistic and election contestants in that they have a propensity for claiming everything.
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It has not been unknown that judges persist in error to avoid giving the appearance of weakness and vacillation.
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Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.
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The Procrustean bed is not a symbol of equality. It is no less inequality to have equality among unequals.
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The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
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In law also the emphasis makes the song.
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Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation's resources and talents.
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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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It is important not to give the appearance of a predisposed mind. And it is more important not to let the mind become predisposed.
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No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
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Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that's all we have between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feelings.
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It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
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Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society.
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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
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I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.
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For the highest exercise of judicial duty is to subordinate one's personal pulls and one's private views to the law of which we are all guaradians - those impersonal convictions that made a society a civilized community, and not the victims of personal rule.
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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
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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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