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

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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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It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
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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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The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.
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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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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 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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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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No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
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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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To some lawyers, all facts are created equal.
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The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
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The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself, and not what we have said about it.
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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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I don’t like a man to be too efficient. He’s likely to be not human enough.
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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 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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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
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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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