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.
We sought justice because equal pay for equal work is an American value. That fight took me ten years. It took me all the way to the Supreme Court. And, in a 5 - 4 decision, they stood on the side of those who shortchanged my pay, my overtime, and my retirement just because I am a woman.
It is indeed an odd business that it has taken this Court nearly two centuries to discover a constitutional mandate to have counsel at a preliminary hearing.
Justice should be blind especially color-blind and able to fairly deal with the very real need for honest law enforcement.
Justice, not expedience, must be the guiding light. The orator must fix his eye on the polestar of justice, and plough straight thither. The moment he glances toward expediency, he falls from his high estate.
In a lot of ways, civil rights division is the conscience of the Justice Department. You can almost measure what kind of Justice Department you have by what kind of civil rights division that you have.
Justice is not cheap. Justice is not quick. It is not ever finally achieved.
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