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

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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.
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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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I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.
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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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No office in the land is more important than that of being a citizen.
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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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Answers are not obtained by putting the wrong question and thereby begging the real one.
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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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Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.
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Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.
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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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Morals are three-quarters manners.
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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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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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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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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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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.
Felix Frankfurter
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No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.
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There is no inevitability in history except as men make it.
Felix Frankfurter
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Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.
Felix Frankfurter