Jerome Frank: The Making of a New Deal Lawyer

Featuring, Daniel R. Ernst, the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Legal History at the Georgetown University Law Center.

For two years at the start of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, the legal realist and corporate attorney Jerome Frank was one of the more visible lawyers of the New Deal, publicly celebrated and privately deplored for trying to prevent meat packers, cigarette manufacturers, and milk distributors from mulcting the public.  Journalists saw Frank’s firing in February 1935 as the elimination of “the last stronghold of militant liberalism in the Roosevelt administration.”  Professor Ernst will describe the making of this New Dealer, including Frank’s childhood and education on the South Side of Chicago, early law practice, sallies into Chicago politics, literary efforts, unsatisfying move to New York City, publication of the Freudian Law and the Modern Mind (1930) and entrée into the legal academe. 

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