Felix Frankfurter - Personal Relations On The Court

Personal Relations On The Court

Throughout his career on the court, Frankfurter was a large influence on many justices, such as Clark, Burton, Whittaker, and Minton. He generally attempted to influence any new justice coming in, though he managed to repel Justice Brennan – who had voted with Frankfurter half the time in his first year, but then opposed him after Frankfurter's attempts at inculcation. Frankfurter turned against Brennan completely after the case of Irvin v. Dowd. Other justices who received the Frankfurter treatment of flattery and instruction were Burton, Vinson, and Harlan. With Vinson, who became Chief Justice, Frankfurter feigned deference, though he sought influence.

Justice Frankfurter was in his time the leader of the conservative faction of the Supreme Court; he would for many years feud with liberals like Justices Black and Douglas. He often complained that they "started with a result" and that their work was "shoddy," "result-oriented," and "demagogic". Similarly, Frankfurter panned the work of Chief Justice Earl Warren as "dishonest nonsense."

Frankfurter saw justices with ideas different from his own as part of a more liberal "Axis" – these opponents were chiefly Justices Black and Douglas, but would also include Murphy and Rutledge; the group would for years oppose Frankfurter's judicially restrained ideology. Douglas, Murphy, and then Rutledge were the first justices to agree with Hugo Black's notion that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights protection into it; this view would later mostly become law, during the period of the Warren Court. For his part, Frankfurter would assert that Black's incorporation theory would usurp state control over criminal justice by limiting states' development of new interpretations of criminal due process.

Frankfurter's argumentative style was not popular among his Supreme Court colleagues. "All Frankfurter does is talk, talk, talk," Chief Justice Earl Warren complained. "He drives you crazy." Hugo Black reported that "I thought Felix was going to hit me today, he got so mad." In the Court's biweekly conference sessions, traditionally a period for vote-counting, Frankfurter had the habit of lecturing his colleagues for forty-five minutes at a time or more with his book resting on a podium. Frankfurter's ideological opponents would leave the room or read their mail while he lectured.

Frankfurter was close friends with Justice Robert H. Jackson. The two exchanged much correspondence over their mutual dislike for Justice William O. Douglas. Frankfurter also had a strong influence over Jackson's opinions.

Frankfurter was universally praised for his work before coming to the Supreme Court, and was expected to influence it for decades past the death of FDR. However, Frankfurter's influence over other justices was limited by his failure to adapt to new surroundings, his style of personal relations (relying heavily on the use of flattery and ingratiation, which ultimately proved divisive), and his strict adherence to the ideology of judicial restraint. Michael E. Parrish, professor at UCSD, said of Frankfurter: "History has not been kind to ... there is now almost a universal consensus that Frankfurter the justice was a failure, a judge who... became 'uncoupled from the locomotive of history' during the Second World War, and who thereafter left little in the way of an enduring jurisprudential legacy."