JUDICIARY: Massachusetts Judge

Last week Governor Joseph Buell Ely of Massachusetts appointed Felix Frankfurter, Harvard Law School’s famed liberal, to be a justice of the State Supreme Court. Professor Frankfurter. 49,

Austrian-born, had the endorsement of such U. S. Supreme Court lights as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Dembitz Brandeis and Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, who mar ried Mr. & Mrs. Frankfurter. After his graduation from Harvard Law School in 1906, Felix Frankfurter served as an assistant U. S. attorney in the south ern district of New York. Five years later he was appointed law officer of the War Department’s Bureau of Insular Affairs. In 1917-18 he was confidential assistant to Secretary of War Baker. Considerable notoriety attached itself to Professor Frankfurter as a result of his sympathy for Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, radicals condemned to death in 1927 for murdering a South Braintree paymaster and his guard. While not of their defense counsel, he bitterly attacked the legal operations which sent them to the electric chair. One who had not forgotten this phase of Felix Frankfurter’s career was onetime Governor Alvan Tufts Fuller, who refused clemency to Sacco & Vanzetti. Rankled, he said last week: “With Ely pardoning murderers and Frankfurter, an open sympathizer with murderers, on the Supreme bench, I see no reason why murder should not flourish here in Massachusetts.”