Jerome Frank
| Jerome Frank | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Judge of United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit | |
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In office March 27, 1941 – January 13, 1957 |
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| Nominated by | Franklin Delano Roosevelt |
| Preceded by | Robert Porter Patterson |
| Succeeded by | Leonard Page Moore |
| Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission | |
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In office 1939–1941 |
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| Preceded by | William O. Douglas |
| Succeeded by | Edward C. Eicher |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
Jerome New Frank September 10, 1889 New York City |
| Died | January 13, 1957 (aged 67) New Haven, Connecticut |
| Nationality | American |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse(s) | Florence Kiper (married July 18, 1914) |
| Children | Barbara Frank (born April 10, 1917) |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago |
| Religion | Jewish |
Jerome New Frank (September 10, 1889 – January 13, 1957) was an American legal philosopher and author who played a leading role in the legal realism movement, a chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a federal appellate judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Born in New York City, Frank's parents were Herman Frank and Clara New Frank, descendants of mid-19th-century German Jewish immigrants. Frank's father, also an attorney, relocated the family to Chicago in 1896, where Frank would attend Hyde Park High School, before receiving his Bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1909. Frank obtained his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1912, where he had the highest grades in the school's history, despite leaving the program for a year to work as secretary to reformist Chicago alderman Charles Edward Merriam. Frank worked as a lawyer in private practice in Chicago from 1912 to 1930, specializing in corporate reorganizations, and becoming a partner in the firm in 1919.
In 1930, after having undergone six months of psychoanalysis, Frank published Law and the Modern Mind, which argued against the "basic legal myth" that judges never make law but simply deduce legal conclusions from premises that are clear, certain, and substantially unchanging. Drawing on psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget, Frank proposed that judicial decisions were motivated primarily by the influence of psychological factors on the individual judge. Like his judicial hero, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Frank urged judges and legal scholars to acknowledge openly the gaps and uncertainties in the law, and to think of law pragmatically as a tool for human betterment. The book "dropped like a bombshell on the legal and academic world", quickly becoming "a jurisprudential bestseller" which "was widely noticed as well as criticized". In 1930, Frank moved to New York City, where he practiced until 1933, also working as a research associate at Yale Law School in 1932, where he collaborated with Karl Llewellyn, and feuded with legal idealist Roscoe Pound. In addition to the philosophical disagreements arising from Frank's realism and Pound's idealism, Pound accused Frank of misattributing quotes to him in Law and the Modern Mind, writing to Llewellyn:
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