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.
Almost one in three Americans has had some contact with the criminal justice system. When you reach that saturation point, people begin to understand, in a very visceral way, the difficulties of reentry.
Justice is never given; it is exacted.
What does the Negro want? His answer is very simple. He wants only what all other Americans want. He wants opportunity to make real what the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights say, what the Four Freedoms establish. While he knows these ideals are open to no man completely, he wants only his equal chance to obtain them.
The great can protect themselves, but the poor and humble require the arm and shield of the law.
It cannot bring back and make whole those who suffered and died by a racist's criminal hand. But it can at least reaffirm our nation's commitment to seek the truth and make equal justice a reality.
America has an obligation to secure its borders, but it is wrong to pass laws that treat human beings as something less than human. If my father were alive, he would be in the forefront of the struggle for a fair and humane reform of our immigration laws.
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