Felix Frankfurter

At first, he was here. Student, then teacher; sparkling, irascible, questioning, crusading, teaching, writing, and talking, always talking.

Then he went to Washington, a more spacious classroom. Journalists, lawyers, and Presidents learned to read with care and trepidation the lengthy, percise black-ink memoranda he signed "F. F." and sent off in reams daily. His illness left the fine hand uneven, and made the writing a torture, but the notes still came, and they still were read, shuddered at, and cherished.

Although the flesh was in Washington, nobody at Harvard Law School could ever doubt that Felix Frankfurter was really there, in Austin and Langdell, all the time. To start with, there were the portraits. In Langdell South, pictured in red robes, he looked oddly like a cardinal; in the Root Room, the Gardner Cox painting caught the very man. Etchings, photographs, a statue in the reading room--there was no escaping the likenesses.

There was the professor who, faced with a difficult question, muttered, "Well, let's see, what would F.F. say about that?" Or the student who thought it natural to counter his teacher's argument by saying, "But what about Frankfurter's opinion in..."

And so, while a nation and a profession mourn, it is proper that in Cambridge there should be deeper grief, at the Harvard Law School a deeper silence.