Felix Frankfurter Quotes

The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.

If a man sets out to study all the laws, he will have no time left to transgress them.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

And the law, that is the perfection of reason, cannot suffer anything that is inconvenient.

The law has to be, in part, a teacher.

The study of law is, after all, largely the study of history.

[Discussing the American colonies] In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavour to obtain some smattering in that science ...

After the American Revolution Alexander Hamilton wanted to study law, but there were no law books. So Hamilton wrote them.

A competent knowledge of the laws of that society in which we live, is the proper accomplishment of every gentleman and scholar

… the magistrate should know what law he is to administer, that the subject should know under what law he is to live.

Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason....

I was a sociology major. And it had nothing to do necessarily with law, which is ultimately - I went to law school. But what I tried to do was choose something that I was passionate about or something that I cared about.

If I wasn't a musician, I'd take up the law. They are the rottenest, wealthiest people in America.

The law seemed to be always what I came back to. I have never, one day in my life as a lawyer, regretted my decision to become a lawyer.

As a child, I wanted to be a lawyer because I thought lawyers and the law were wonderful. But they are more wonderful, I think, than I had thought.

We have differing views on law, politics and religion. But I have yet to meet a Scalia clerk who was not grateful to the man who taught us, shaped us, and launched us into our lives in the law. Justice Scalia's passing leaves a giant void in the court and in the intellectual discourse over the law.

When 'The People's Court' came along, I had an opportunity to really teach people about law. It was very important to me.

Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.

The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?

...the statement, "The purpose of the law is to cause justice to reign," is not a rigorously accurate statement. It ought to be stated that the purpose of the law is to prevent injustice from reigning. In fact, it is injustice, instead of justice, that has an existence of its own. Justice is achieved only when injustice is absent.

That's what law is: educated guesses at right and wrong.

The Law likes to be argued with. Take away words and where is the Law? Silence always annoys it.

the study of the law is useful in a variety of points of view. it qualifies a man to be useful to himself, to his neighbors, & to the public.

For those who have only to obey, law is what the sovereign commands. For the sovereign, in the throes of deciding what he ought to command, this view of law is singularly empty of light and leading. In the dispersed sovereignty of modern states, and especially in times of rapid social change, law must look to the future as well as to history and precedent, and to what is possible and right as well as to what is actual.

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.