ABSTRACT
Felix Frankfurter had four careers, any one of which would have been enough to fill another man's life. Born in Vienna in 1882, he came with his family to New York at the age of 12 not knowing a word of English. In January 1939, President Roosevelt appointed Felix Frankfurter an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. This was his fourth, and his crowning career. To say that a judge has opportunities to "shape the law" inevitably and immediately raises the question as to what it is that shapes the understanding of the judge. Small comfort to the advocates of states' rights to hear that matters of "intimate concern" to the state and, so, "reserved" to the state may be swept from the boards by Congress. The process of adjusting the interacting areas of national and state authority over commerce has been reflected in hundreds of cases from the very beginning of history.
