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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.

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
Books
Confine
Written
Statutes
Law
Gloss
Upon
Disregard
Found
Narrow
Book
Conception
Would
Notion
Jurisprudence
Life
Laws
Statute

More quotes by Felix Frankfurter

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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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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
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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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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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Judicial judgment must take deep account...of the day before yesterday in order that yesterday may not paralyze today.
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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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Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.
Felix Frankfurter
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The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression.
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Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world.
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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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No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
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If nowhere else, in the relation between Church and State, good fences make good neighbors.
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A court which yields to the popular will thereby licenses itself to practice despotism, for there can be no assurance that it will not, on another occasion, indulge its own will.
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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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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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Is that which was deemed to be of so fundamental a nature as to be written into the Constitution to endure for all times to be the sport of shifting winds of doctrine?
Felix Frankfurter
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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
Felix Frankfurter
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Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.
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In law also the emphasis makes the song.
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.
Felix Frankfurter