"Anybody can decide a question if only a single principle is in controversy"
About this Quote
Frankfurter is skewering a seductive fantasy about judging: that hard cases are just logic puzzles waiting for the right mind to solve them. If only one principle were actually “in controversy,” any competent person could crank the handle and spit out an answer. The barb is aimed at legal absolutists who treat constitutional interpretation like a one-track equation - pick the “real” principle (original meaning, liberty, equality, federalism) and the rest is mechanical.
The subtext is that law almost never offers that luxury. Supreme Court cases arrive as collisions: speech versus security, equality versus local control, individual rights versus institutional legitimacy. The work of judging, Frankfurter implies, is not discovering a single shining rule but managing plural, often incompatible commitments without pretending they harmonize neatly. His line also smuggles in a warning about certainty. When someone sounds too sure, it may be because they’ve quietly bracketed the competing principle that makes the problem morally and politically live.
Context matters: Frankfurter, a leading mid-century judicial restraint advocate, distrusted grand theories and preferred incrementalism, deference to democratic institutions, and sensitivity to facts. This quip defends that posture without sermonizing. It reframes restraint not as timidity but as intellectual honesty: acknowledging that constitutional law is less a courtroom syllogism than a balancing act under conditions of disagreement.
It’s also a subtle critique of the Court’s own mythology. If decisions are portrayed as inevitable deductions from one principle, accountability evaporates. Frankfurter insists the opposite: controversy is the point, and pretending otherwise is the real shortcut.
The subtext is that law almost never offers that luxury. Supreme Court cases arrive as collisions: speech versus security, equality versus local control, individual rights versus institutional legitimacy. The work of judging, Frankfurter implies, is not discovering a single shining rule but managing plural, often incompatible commitments without pretending they harmonize neatly. His line also smuggles in a warning about certainty. When someone sounds too sure, it may be because they’ve quietly bracketed the competing principle that makes the problem morally and politically live.
Context matters: Frankfurter, a leading mid-century judicial restraint advocate, distrusted grand theories and preferred incrementalism, deference to democratic institutions, and sensitivity to facts. This quip defends that posture without sermonizing. It reframes restraint not as timidity but as intellectual honesty: acknowledging that constitutional law is less a courtroom syllogism than a balancing act under conditions of disagreement.
It’s also a subtle critique of the Court’s own mythology. If decisions are portrayed as inevitable deductions from one principle, accountability evaporates. Frankfurter insists the opposite: controversy is the point, and pretending otherwise is the real shortcut.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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