Democratic Justice is the definitive biography of Felix Frankfurter, Supreme Court justice and champion of twentieth-century American liberal democracy. Frankfurter, an Austrian-Jewish immigrant, arrived in the United States at age eleven not able to speak a word of English. By age twenty-six, he had befriended former president Theodore Roosevelt, and by age fifty was one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers. He became the third Jewish U.S. Supreme Court justice, and a leading Zionist. As a justice, he hired the first African American law clerk and helped the Court achieve unanimity in outlawing racially segregated schools in “Brown v. Board of Education.” He fought for a Jewish state at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, saved his uncle from a Nazi prison in Vienna after the Anschluss, and he and his allies persuaded Harry Truman to be the first world leader to recognize the State of Israel.
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