PROFESSOR FRANKFURTER

Governor Ely acted with great courage in nominating Professor Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. For though Professor Frankfurter has many warm friends in this Commonwealth, he also has bitter enemies who have neither understood nor forgiven his part in the Sacco-Vanzetti affair. It is therefore highly gratifying to know that the Governor's Council had already acknowledged his peculiar fitness for the position before his decision to decline the appointment became known.

Nearly fifty years ago Justice Holmes was confronted with the same choice. As everyone knows, he left Harvard Law School and began his noble career on the bench. Many of Professor Frankfurter's admirers were genuinely disappointed that he did not do likewise. In times such as these when great social changes are underway and governments are complied by events to travel uncharted courses, it is important that vacancies in the courts of law are filled by agile-minded men who understand the underlying currents of our civilization. Yet Professor Frankfurter has decided that legal education has a higher claim.

In the forty odd years which have elapsed between the two decisions of the two teachers of law, the world situation has altered profoundly. It is now an open question whether democracy and the system of jurisprudence which is associated with it can meet successfully the ever more difficult tasks which the momentous economic and political forces of our day thrust upon them. It is no longer sufficient that a law school transmit the accumulated body of legal knowledge and give proficient training in legal practice. If the bar and bench are not to be a dead hand upon the process of social and economic readjustment and invention with which our generation must necessarily concern itself, then the schools of law must undertake something more far-reaching. As some of the most eminent professors of law themselves have declared, the law schools must take on the function of adjusting the law itself to the changing needs of a confused, complex, ill-balanced social order.

Professor Frankfurter has been actively identified with this creative process since he first came to Harvard in 1911. It is more imperative that this shall go forward than that the courts be filled with liberal judges. It is fortunate that he has chosen to stay at Harvard and continue to participate in this fascinating process. New generations of Harvard students should be even more grateful for the chance to risk the contagion of his restless, inquisitive mind and perhaps acquire some of his passionate concern for human problems.