Jerome Frank

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. He was chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Early life, education, and career Born in New York City, New York, 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, Illinois, in 1896, where Frank would attend Hyde Park High School, before receiving his Bachelor of Philosophy degree from the University of Chicago in 1909. Frank obtained his Juris Doctor 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. Academic writing Frank was a legal skeptic. He characterized cases through an equation: R x F = D, where R stands for the applicable legal rule; F signifies the facts of the case; and D signifies the decision. Frank distinguished two classes of American legal realists: rule skeptics and fact skeptics. Rule skeptics—who Frank dismissively referred to as "magic addicts"—were skeptical that the legal rules articulated in decisions could adequately explain case outcomes, but, by employing various social sciences, they believed they could discover "real rules" that could predict case outcomes. Frank, on the other hand, considered himself a "fact skeptic": While he, too, traced uncertainty in the law to indeterminate legal rules, he believed that legal uncertainty was inevitable given the impossibility of predicting judicial fact finding or fully comprehending the myriad psychological influences on a judge that might affect a decision. Moreover, Frank argued that this indefeasible uncertainty was not to be bemoaned; rather, he commented, "Much of the uncertainty of law is not an unfortunate accident: it is of immense social value."