One is entitled to say without qualification that the correlation between prior judicial experience and fitness for the Supreme Court is zero.
Interpretation
Judicial experience does not determine a person's capability to serve on the Supreme Court.
Felix Frankfurter's quote suggests that having prior judicial experience does not necessarily correlate with an individual's qualifications to serve on the Supreme Court. This challenges the conventional wisdom that experience is a prerequisite for such an important judicial role, emphasizing that other qualities and perspectives may be equally or more important.
In practice
During a panel discussion on judicial reform, this quote can be cited to argue for a broader definition of qualifications for judges.
Ultimately there can be no freedom for self unless it is vouchsafed for others; there can be no security where there is fear, and a democratic society presupposes confidence and candor in the relations of men with one another and eager collaboration for the larger ends of life instead of the pursuit of petty, selfish or vainglorious aims.
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.
Democracy is always a beckoning goal, not a safe harbor. For freedom is an unremitting endeavor, never a final achievement.
Without a free press there can be no free society. That is axiomatic. However, freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of a free society. The scope and nature of the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of the press are to be viewed and applied in that light.
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.
Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.
You white folks have long been eating the white meat of the chicken. We Negroes are now ready for some of the white meat instead of the dark meat.
For a lawyer to do less than his utmost is, I strongly feel, a betrayal of his client. Though in criminal trials one tends to focus on the defense attorney and his client the accused, the prosecutor is also a lawyer, and he too has a client: the People. And the People are equally entitled to their day in court, to a fair and impartial trial, and to justice.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. The struggle for justice must never be adjourned. The forces of injustice do not take vacations.
Circumstances of crimes vary. So do motives. And so do prospects for rehabilitation. The number of imponderables makes it impossible to sentence by formula and still sentence justly.
If you ask me what is at the core of what I write, it isn't about 'rights', it's about justice. Justice is a grand, beautiful, revolutionary idea.
The risk of racial prejudice infecting a capital sentencing proceeding is especially serious in light of the complete finality of the death sentence.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.