Jerome Frank

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This article is about the jurist. For the psychiatrist, see Jerome Frank (psychiatrist) .

Jerome New Frank (September 10, 1889 – January 13, 1957) was an American legal philosopher and author who played a leading role in the legal realism movement. He was chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission , and a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit .

Contents

• 1 Early life, education, and career

• 2 Academic writing

  • 2.1 Law and the Modern Mind

  • 2.2 Later scholarly writing

• 3 Executive branch service

• 4 Federal judicial service

  • 4.1 Judicial philosophy

  • 4.2 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

  • 4.3 United States v. Roth

• 5 Personal life and death

• 6 Legacy

• 7 Works

• 8 See also

• 9 References

• 10 Sources and further reading

• 11 External links

Early life, education, and career

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Frank in the University of Chicago yearbook, 1908

Born in New York City , New York , Frank's parents were Herman Frank and Clara New Frank, descendants of mid-19th-century German Jewish immigrants. Frank's father, also an attorney, relocated the family to Chicago , Illinois , in 1896, where Frank would attend Hyde Park High School , before receiving his Bachelor of Philosophy degree from the University of Chicago in 1909. Frank obtained his J.D. degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1912, where he had the highest grades in the school's history,

despite leaving the program for a year to work as secretary to reformist Chicago alderman Charles Edward Merriam . Frank worked as a lawyer in private practice in Chicago from 1912 to 1930, specializing in corporate reorganizations , and becoming a partner in his firm in 1919.

Academic writing

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Frank was a legal skeptic . He characterized cases through an equation: R x F = D, where R stands for the applicable legal rule; F signifies the facts of the case; and D signifies the decision. : 540  Frank distinguished two classes of American legal realists: rule skeptics and fact skeptics. : 645–46  Rule skeptics—who Frank dismissively referred to as "magic addicts"—were skeptical that the legal rules articulated in decisions could adequately explain case outcomes, : 540  but, by employing various social sciences, they believed they could discover "real rules" that could predict case outcomes. : 1141  : 540  Frank, on the other hand, considered himself a "fact skeptic": : 543  While he, too, traced uncertainty in the law to indeterminate legal rules, he believed that legal uncertainty was inevitable given the impossibility of predicting judicial fact finding or fully comprehending the myriad psychological influences on a judge that might affect a decision. : 1141  Moreover, Frank argued that this indefeasible uncertainty was not to be bemoaned; rather, he commented, "Much of the uncertainty of law is not an unfortunate accident: it is of immense social value." : 6–7  : 1142 

Law and the Modern Mind

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In 1930, after having undergone six months of psychoanalysis , Frank published _Law and the Modern Mind _, which argued against the "basic legal myth" that judges never make law but simply deduce legal conclusions from premises that are clear, certain, and substantially unchanging. Drawing on psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget , Frank proposed that judicial decisions were motivated primarily by the influence of psychological factors on the individual judge. Like his judicial hero, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. , Frank urged judges and legal scholars to acknowledge openly the gaps and uncertainties in the law, and to think of law pragmatically as a tool for human betterment.

The book "dropped like a bombshell on the legal and academic world",

quickly becoming "a jurisprudential bestseller" which "was widely noticed as well as criticized". In 1930, Frank moved to New York City, where he practiced until 1933, also working as a research associate at Yale Law School in 1932, where he collaborated with Karl Llewellyn of Columbia Law School , and feuded with legal ideal

…

Frank was considered a highly competent judge, often taking what was perceived as the more liberal position on civil liberties issues. In addition to his reputation for expertise on civil liberties matters, he was also considered to be "an outstanding judge in the fields of procedure , finance , [and] criminal law ". For a time, he was sharply and vocally at odds with a colleague on the bench, Charles Edward Clark , "over a whole range of common law precepts". In a tribute when Frank died, Clark referred to these disagreements as "glorious battles" and called Frank "a gladiator of unusual power and adroitness," who "never seemed to harbor permanent spite of any form whatsoever." : 818 

Frank's scholarly tendency bled over into his judicial opinions, some of which were notoriously lengthy. One anecdote relayed about this aspect of Frank's work tells of a law clerk who had objected to the length of one of Frank's opinions. According to the story:

He spent all of a week and finally cut it down from sixty-five pages to one-half page. He left both on Judge Frank's desk without comment. The following morning Judge Frank rushed into his clerk's office and shouted, 'Bully for you,' displaying the clerk's work, 'we'll add it to the end'.