Time & Perspective Quote by Felix Frankfurter

Frankfurter’s line is a warning shot at two temptations that haunt courts: nostalgia disguised as fidelity, and the lazy comfort of precedent. By insisting that “judicial judgment” must take “deep account” of “the day before yesterday,” he’s not fetishizing antiquity. He’s arguing for historical literacy as a tool of escape. The past, read properly, becomes less a chain than a map: you study how doctrines were born, what problems they were meant to solve, and which anxieties they smuggled in. Only then can you keep “yesterday” from “paralyz[ing] today” - a vivid verb choice that frames precedent not as guidance but as a potential medical condition, a legal limb gone numb.

The subtext is classic Frankfurter: an institutionalist’s plea for restraint without rigidity. As a leading figure of judicial deference in the New Deal and post-New Deal era, he distrusted courts that sprinted ahead of democratic processes, but he also distrusted judges who treated old rulings as sacred relics. “Day before yesterday” suggests something older than last term’s case law: social history, constitutional origins, the long arc of consequences. It’s an argument for method, not outcome.

Contextually, this is the mid-20th century judiciary trying to navigate modernity - industrial power, administrative agencies, civil liberties - with 18th- and 19th-century language. Frankfurter is telling judges: don’t let the most recent past bully you. Make the past explain itself, so the present can still move.