By the time Felix Frankfurter came to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, he had fought monopolies, defended striking workers, taught law at Harvard University, and written frequently for the New Republic. So maybe it was sheer momentum that kept him dabbling in public affairs from the bench. He remained one of Roosevelt's closest policy advisers, even though doing so offended the monastic ideal that judges must be "less worldly than others in order to be more judicial" -- as Frankfurter once put it.
Since Frankfurter's death in 1965, his reputation as a combative and principled jurist has endured. And so...
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