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78 twelve Justice Frankfurter All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the materials out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them. —Justice Felix Frankfurter My year with Justice Frankfurter (from September 1, 1948, to August 31, 1949) remains among the most meaningful and enjoyable of my life. Having greatly admired a legend from afar, I discovered, working with him daily for most of the year, that he was even more brilliant, caring, widely read, informed, witty, and, yes, demanding than I could ever have imagined. Each day was a thrill, walking up the steps into the grand Supreme Court building. My associations with the sixteen other law clerks, who arrived from various parts of the country, bringing different philosophies and perspectives, was both stimulating and collegial. They were the select few from my law school generation who had scaled these steeples of excellence. I also quickly learned to appreciate the professionalism and helpfulness of the Office of the Clerk and the Supreme Court marshals. Working in this oasis of intellectual ferment and civilized tranquility, I was able to ignore for the most part the brutal fact that our nation’s capital at that time was almost completely racially segregated, including the hotels, theatres, schools, department stores, and restaurants, except for the Supreme Court cafeteria, the railway station, and a few other isolated eating places. Lovida and I rented an apartment in a segregated neighborhood because the 1948 Washington Real Estate Board Code of Ethics expressly declared that no property in a white section of the city should ever be sold, rented, advertised, or offered to colored people. Even the employment practices of the city and federal government were highly discriminatory. Starting on September 1, Elliot and I were in Frankfurter’s chambers every day. Although the justice did not return to Washington until September 15, he was on the phone with us three or four times a day discussing various issues and giving us assignments. While on summer vacation he had read and reread 02-0488-1 part2.indd 78 9/9/10 8:27 PM Justice Frankfurter / 79 all the printed petitions for writs of certiorari and jurisdictional statements, which were delivered to him by pouch wherever he was in the world. When Elliot and I were preparing for our clerkships, we read all the articles and briefs of Felix Frankfurter before he was appointed to the bench. Frankfurter strongly advocated positions advanced by the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, and New Deal proponents. Our reading was useful only because it confirmed Frankfurter’s independence as a justice. He completely put aside his personal views and addressed only the facts of a particular controversy , adhering to the specific meaning of the words of the governing statute, whether or not he personally agreed with the legislative policy underlying it. On September 17, Justice Frankfurter made his grand entrance as he dashed through our offices on the way to the bathroom. In the presence of my new employer I felt like Manasseh Cutler, a Massachusetts minister, when he first met Benjamin Franklin: “My knees smote together.”1 Yet, I thought to myself, he is human like the rest of us, having to answer the call of nature. When we met at ten in the morning I was immediately put at ease by the justice’s unassuming style. Again the words of Manasseh Cutler describing Ben Franklin captured perfectly my impressions of that first meeting: I was highly delighted with the extensive knowledge he appeared to have of every subject, the brightness of his memory, and clearness and the vivacity of all his mental faculties. . . . His manners [were] perfectly easy, and everything about him seem[ed] to diffuse an unrestrained freedom and happiness. He [had] an incessant vein of humor, accompanied with an uncommon vivacity, which seem[ed] as natural and voluntary as his breathing.2 It is true that as I got to know the justice better that year and over subsequent years, I learned that he did not suffer fools gladly and sometimes chafed at the obstinacy of slower men and women, regretting the waste of time it took to explain and persuade even his acknowledged peers, including law professors and justices. The justice was a fairly short man, even shorter than my five feet seven inches. But no one ever thought of him...

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