Jerome Frank

Born in New York City, Frank's parents were Herman Frank and Clara New Frank, descendants of mid-19th-century German Jewish immigrants.[2] Frank's father, also an attorney, relocated the family to Chicago in 1896, where Frank would attend Hyde Park High School,[2] before receiving his Bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1909.[2] Frank obtained his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1912,[3] where he had the highest grades in the school's history,[2][4] despite leaving the program for a year to work as secretary to reformist Chicago alderman Charles Edward Merriam.[2] 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.[2]

Entry into writing and academia[edit]

In 1930, after having undergone six months of psychoanalysis, Frank published Law and the Modern Mind, which proposed that judicial decisions were motivated primarily by the influence of psychological factors on the individual judge.[5] The book "dropped like a bombshell on the legal and academic world",[5] quickly becoming "a jurisprudential bestseller" which "was widely noticed as well as criticized".[6] 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 Llwellyn:

I am troubled about Jerome Frank. When a man puts in quotation marks and attributes to a writer things which he not only never put in print any where, but goes contrary to what he has set in print repeatedly, it seems to me to go beyond the limits of permissible carelessness and to be incompatible, not merely with scholarship but with the ordinary fair play of controversy.[7]

Llewellyn defended Frank, but Pound would not relent. This led Frank to produce a lengthy memorandum showing where each quote attributed to Pound by Frank could be found in Pound's writing, and offering to pay Pound to hire someone to verify the citations.[8] Pound would continue to attack Frank's legal philosophy throughout his life, although Frank later moderated his views on legal realism.[9]

Executive branch service[edit]

During the New Deal administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Frank sought the assistance of Felix Frankfurter to secure a position with the administration.[2] Frank was initially offered the position of solicitor of the United States Department of Agriculture, but this appointment was blocked by Senator James A. Farley, who favored another candidate for the job.[2] Frank was then appointed as general counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in 1933, and soon became embroiled in an internal struggle with the agency's head, George N. Peek, who had tried to exercise complete control over the agency.[2] Peek resigned in December 1933, and Frank continued to serve until February 1935, when he was purged along with young leftist lawyers in his office. Roosevelt approved the purge,[10] but made Frank a special counsel to the Reconstruction Finance Association in 1935.[2]

Frank returned to private practice in New York from 1936 to 1938, with the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst. In 1937, William O. Douglas recommended that Roosevelt appoint Frank to be a commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which Douglas then chaired.[2] Roosevelt agreed, and Frank served as an SEC commissioner from December 1937 until 1941, and was elevated to Chairman from 1939 to 1941, when Douglas was appointed to the United States Supreme Court.[2] While serving in the SEC, Frank also served on the Temporary National Economic Committee.[2]

In 1938, Frank also published a book titled Save America First, which had been written during his return to private practice and advocating against American involvement in the stirring conflict in Europe. However, Frank recanted those views after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Roosevelt forgave Frank's isolationism.[5]

Federal judicial service[edit]

On February 13, 1941, Roosevelt named Frank as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second

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