Frank, Jerome (1889–1957)

Jerome Frank, born in New York, was a key intellectual figure in legal realism as well as a law-trained federal administrator during the New Deal and a judge on the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals from 1941 until his death of a heart attack in 1957.

He published several books, although his classic work,Law and the Modern Mind (1930), established his credentials as a legal philosopher and realist. Relying on the theories of Jean Piaget (1896–1980) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Frank argued that the basic myth of the modern legal system was that the law could be made stationary and certain, and that this myth rested upon the psychological need for certainty and paternal authority. His other most notable book,Courts on Trial (1949), outlined ...