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To be effective, judicial administration must not be leaden-footed.

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
Administration
Must
Leaden
Footed
Judicial
Effective

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Gratitude is one of the least articulate of the emotions, especially when it is deep. I can express with very limited adequacy the passionate devotion to this land that possesses millions of our people, born, like myself, under other skies, for the privilege that that this county has bestowed in allowing them to partake of its fellowship.
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Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
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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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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 would be a narrow conception of jurisprudence to confine the notion of laws to what is found written on the statute books, and to disregard the gloss which life has written upon it.
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No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
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Morals are three-quarters manners.
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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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One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution... But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic.
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The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
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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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It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
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No court can make time stand still.
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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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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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If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors.
Felix Frankfurter
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In law also the emphasis makes the song.
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The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security derived from the inquiring mind.
Felix Frankfurter
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Ours is an accusatorial, and not an inquisitorial, system - a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured, and may not, by coercion, prove its charge against an accused out of his own mouth.
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The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.
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