Harris & Ewing · Public domain

Born in Vienna and brought to New York at twelve, Frankfurter helped found the American Civil Liberties Union before Franklin Roosevelt named him to the Supreme Court in 1939, where he served more than two decades as a leading advocate of judicial restraint. His confirmation hearing was the first time a Supreme Court nominee was required to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a practice that became routine by the 1950s. Colleagues' relations with him were strained by ideology and, the record suggests, some antisemitism, but his 1943 dissent in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette explicitly set aside his own "minority-group background" from the case at hand.