Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter

Felix Frankfurter Official Portrait, 1939

Quick Facts

Significance:

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Place of Birth:

Vienna, Austria-Hungary

Date of Birth:

November 15, 1882

Place of Death:

Washington D.C.

Date of Death:

February 22, 1965

Place of Burial:

Cambridge, MA

Cemetery Name:

Mount Auburn Cemetery

Felix Frankfurter was born in 1882 in Vienna, Austria and landed in New York because of his family’s relocation in 1893. In New York he studied at the City College of New York and later at Harvard Law School where he eventually taught as a law professor.

He started his political career advising President Franklin D. Roosevelt on New Deal legislation, among other things. Later, in 1939, Roosevelt appointed Frankfurter Associate Justice to the Supreme Court where he remained until 1962. During the latter part of Roosevelt’s administration, Frankfurter and his fellow justices were considered a “liberal-thinking assembly”. Later, during Harry S. Truman’s administration in December 1952, these justices assembled to hear oral arguments in the five school segregation cases that comprised Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

These cases were initiated by the NAACP to which Frankfurter had given ten years of legal advice at the start of his career. Frankfurter proved to be deeply opposed to segregation, but recognized that the justices were conflicted about integration, and needed more time to reach a decision. He suggested the cases be reheard in June of 1953, and were eventually heard in October of that year. Between October 1953 and May of 1954 when the justices reached their decision, Frankfurter was responsible for drafting questions to ask the opposing lawyers.

He was particularly concerned with how states would handle integration, and how long the South would need to adjust to the process of integration. The announcement of the Supreme Court’s judgement and opinion in Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka on May 17, 1954 “…that in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place…” deeply influenced the direction that civil rights would take as Truman’s administration ended.

In his later years as Justice, Frankfurter continued to carry out his belief that decent government depended in part on procedural safeguards for criminal suspects; this ideal conflicted with his policy that the Supreme Court should defer to other branches of the federal government and to the states. He continued to author books, the last being Felix Frankfurter Reminisces in 1960. He retired from the Court in 1962 and was later awarded with the Medal of Freedom by John F. Kennedy in July 1963.