"The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards"
About this Quote
The specific intent is almost corrective: rights mean little if the state can bypass the steps that make coercion accountable. “Procedural safeguards” is deliberately bloodless language for something visceral: the difference between a government that can jail you because it wants to and a government that must prove, record, and justify. He’s not romanticizing procedure for its own sake; he’s elevating it as the scaffolding that keeps lofty principles from collapsing under stress.
The subtext is also a warning about emergencies. Wars, panics, and moral crusades are when societies discover how quickly they’ll trade freedom for speed. Frankfurter’s line implies that the erosion of liberty rarely announces itself with tyranny’s theatrics; it comes through small exceptions, shortcuts, and “temporary” suspensions that outlive their pretexts.
Context matters: Frankfurter wrote and ruled in an era shaped by the New Deal’s expansion of government, World War II (including the Court’s shameful approval of Japanese American internment in Korematsu), and the early Cold War’s loyalty anxieties. His procedural focus reads as both principled and haunted: a jurist insisting that even well-intentioned power needs friction, because without it, the law becomes a tool of the moment rather than a restraint on it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: McNabb et al. v. United States, 318 U.S. 332 (1943) (Felix Frankfurter, 1943)
Evidence: The history of liberty has largely been the history of observance of procedural safeguards. (Page 347). This line appears in Justice Felix Frankfurter’s majority opinion for the Court in McNabb et al. v. United States. Many secondary quotations add the word "the" before "observance" ("the observance of procedural safeguards"), but the opinion text itself (as reproduced by Cornell LII and by Justia’s paginated U.S. Reports version) omits "the." The statement is on page 347 of the U.S. Reports pagination in the Justia version. Other candidates (1) Bioterrorism: The History of a Crisis in American Society (David McBride, 2020) compilation95.0% ... Felix Frankfurter aptly observed , " The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of pro... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Frankfurter, Felix. (2026, February 13). The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-history-of-liberty-has-largely-been-the-142266/
Chicago Style
Frankfurter, Felix. "The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards." FixQuotes. February 13, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-history-of-liberty-has-largely-been-the-142266/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards." FixQuotes, 13 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-history-of-liberty-has-largely-been-the-142266/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2026.
