Background
He was born in New York City, the son of Herman Frank, a lawyer, and of Clara New.
( Law and the Modern Mind first appeared in 1930 when, in...)
Law and the Modern Mind first appeared in 1930 when, in the words of Judge Charles E. Clark, it "fell like a bomb on the legal world." In the generations since, its influence has grown--today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence. The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the delusion that the law is a bastion of predictable and logical action. Jerome Frank's controversial thesis is that the decisions made by judge and jury are determined to an enormous extent by powerful, concealed, and highly idiosyncratic psychological prejudices that these decision-makers bring to the courtroom. Frank points out that legal verdicts are supposed to result from the application of legal rules to the facts of the suit--a procedure that sounds utterly methodical. Frank argues, that profound, immeasurable biases strongly influence the judge and jury's reaction to witnesses, lawyers, and litigants. As a result, we can never know what they will believe "the facts of the suit" to be. The trial's results become unforeseeable, the lawyer's advice unreliable, and the cause of justice insecure. This edition includes the author's final preface in which he answers two decades of criticism of his position.
https://www.amazon.com/Law-Modern-Mind-Jerome-Frank/dp/1412808308?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1412808308
https://www.amazon.com/Law-Modern-Mind-Leather-Bound/dp/B000MOFDII?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000MOFDII
( CONTENTS: I. The Needless Mystery of Court House Govern...)
CONTENTS: I. The Needless Mystery of Court House Government. II. Fights and Rights. III. Facts Are Guesses. IV. Modern Legal Magic. V. Wizards and Lawyers. VI. The "Fight" Theory versus the "Truth" Theory. VII. The Procedural Reformers. VIII. The Jury System. IX. Defenses of the Jury System--Suggested Reforms. X. Are Judges Human? XI. Psychological Approaches. XII. Criticism of Trial-Court Decisions--The Gestalt. XIII. A Trial as a Communicative Process. XIV. "Legal Science" and "Legal Engineering." XV. The Upper-Court Myth. XVI. Legal Education. XVII. Special Training for Trial Judges. XVIII. The Cult of the Robe. XIX. Precedents and Stability. XX. Codification. XXI. Words and Music: Legislation and Judicial Interpretation. XXII. Constitutions--The Merry-Go-Round. XIII. Legal Reasoning. XXIV. Da Capo. XXV. The Anthropological Approach. XXVI. Natural Law. XXVII. The Psychology of Litigants. XXVIII. The Unblindfolding of Justice. XXIX. Classicism and Romanticism. XXX. Justice and Emotions. XXXI. Questioning Some Legal Axioms. XXXII. Reason and Unreason--Ideals.
https://www.amazon.com/Courts-Trial-Jerome-Frank/dp/0691027552?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0691027552
judge author legal philosopher
He was born in New York City, the son of Herman Frank, a lawyer, and of Clara New.
The family later moved to Chicago, and Frank received the Ph. B.
at the University of Chicago in 1909.
He became secretary to Charles E. Merriam, his political science teacher at the university, when Merriam was elected a reform alderman (1909 - 1911).
In 1912 Frank graduated from the University of Chicago Law School with highest honors.
Frank specialized in corporate reorganization law in Chicago from 1912 to 1929. In the latter year he joined the New York law firm of Chadbourne, Stanchfield and Levy.
On Felix Frankfurter's recommendation he was appointed general counsel to both the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation in May 1933.
Because of a policy disagreement--his group interpreted the tenant provisions of the AAA contracts with farmers liberally, in order to protect the interests of the hard-pressed southern sharecroppers--Frank and his staff were fired in 1935. President Franklin D. Roosevelt immediately appointed Frank as special counsel to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
He prepared for Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes the government's case in behalf of the Public Works Administration against the Alabama Power Company. The government sought approval for federal construction of electricity distribution systems, and was upheld by the Supreme Court.
The low government salary led Frank to resume the private practice of law in 1936.
In 1930 Frank attained fame as a legal philosopher and exponent of the school of "legal realism" through the publication of Law and the Modern Mind, an attempt to psychoanalyze the law. In 1932 he was appointed a research associate at the Yale Law School, and after 1946 was a visiting lecturer.
In 1931 and again in 1946-1947 he was a visiting lecturer in law and anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In the history of jurisprudence there have been four major schools of thought: the natural law, the historical, the analytical or positivist, and the sociological, of which legal realism was an offshoot.
In the 1930's and 1940's legal realism was the dominant school in American jurisprudence, and Frank was one of its main spokesmen. He sought to analyze the decisional process on a psychological basis as a necessary corrective to the false picture often painted of the law as a strictly legal process. The sociological school (the outstanding exponent of which was Roscoe Pound of the Harvard Law School) emphasized the socioeconomic forces shaping the law.
The legal realists used various approaches to the study of the law in action, and Frank was the articulate artificer of its psychological wing. The legal realists, even more than the sociological school, deemphasized the preeminence of logic in the law. Frank in particular added a new dimension by emphasizing the psychological forces that produce an element of uncertainty in the law.
He died at New Haven, Connecticut.
He helped reorganize the Union Pacific Railroad, for which he earned a fee of $38, 000. In 1937, at the request of William O. Douglas, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), he became a commissioner. When Douglas was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1939, Frank became chairman of the SEC for two years. In 1941 he was named a judge of the U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, comprising New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. He served on the court until his death.
( Law and the Modern Mind first appeared in 1930 when, in...)
( CONTENTS: I. The Needless Mystery of Court House Govern...)
The gospel of both Pound and Frank was that the jurist has an imperative duty to study empirically how law functions in society.
He helped reorganize the Union Pacific Railroad, for which he earned a fee of $38, 000.
The gospel of both Pound and Frank was that the jurist has an imperative duty to study empirically how law functions in society. Their principal protest was against analytical positivism, which posited a closed system of legal logic, a mechanistic approach holding that the judge never makes or invents new law through interpretation but only discovers it. Before becoming a judge, Frank had assigned a "subordinate role" to rules.
He later changed their status to a "significant" one. In his later writings he realized that he had previously exaggerated the extent of uncertainty in legal rules. It is easier to be a revolutionary in theoretical discussions than when deciding actual cases. But he was right in considering rules as only one of the factors entering into judicial decisionmaking, which frequently involves individualization.
Frank was wrongly accused of being an extreme nominalist who refused to believe in any rules. On the contrary, he spoke of a "profound respect for the utility of syllogistic reasoning linked with an insistence upon recurrent revisions of premises based on patient studies of new facts and new desires. . "
Over time Frank shifted his emphasis from rule skepticism to fact skepticism. To him the individual traits of judges--deeply buried personal biases--often loomed larger than their socioeconomic biases.
He was haunted by the specter of uncertainty about facts and resulting wrong decisions caused by the fallibility of judges, juries, and witnesses. He therefore suggested a number of reforms. He was an enthusiastic advocate of the inclusion of social studies in the law school curriculum. His opinion in U. S. v. Roth, 237 F. 2d 796 (2d Cir. 1956), an obscenity case, has been called a classic.
In it Frank supported his conclusions by research into social, scientific, psychological, and economic information. He wrote that social ideals must direct the thought of legal thinkers. He also championed the "scientific spirit"--"the discipline of suspended judgment. " Frank believed that a society's treatment of the weak and powerless was "the test of the moral quality of a civilization. "
Quotations: He wrote in a dissenting opinion in U. S. v. Johnson, 238 F. 2d 565 (1956), later upheld by the Supreme Court in 352 U. S. 565 (1957): "But I, for one, cannot sleep well if I think that, due to my judicial decisions in which I join, innocent destitute men may be behind bars solely because it will cost the government something to have their appeals considered. " To him, "Justice is as justice does. "
He was an enthusiastic advocate of the inclusion of social studies in the law school curriculum.
He married Florence Kiper, a poet and playwright. They had one daughter.
