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Frankfurter seldom authored history making majority opinions, but his penetrating mind and formidable argumentative powers made him enormously influential in the closed-door conferences that precede the court's decisions. Another great jurist. Learned Hand, once called him "the most important single figure in our whole judicial system." Although he could be a profoundly kind and considerate man. Frankfurter had a waspish streak of intellectual impatience, and he sometimes jabbed lawyers, and even fellow Justices, with sharp-edged remarks or questions designed to make them get to the point. But no one could doubt his deep devotion to the law. A Harvard colleague once said to him chidingly: "You take law awfully seriously." To that, Frankfurter could plead guilty.
"I do take law very seriously, deeply seriously." he once explained, "because fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the expression of the institutionalized medium of reason, that's all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling."