Felix Frankfurter

“ Moreover, the most authoritative student of the history of contempt of court has impressively shown that 'from the reign of Edward I it was established that the Court had power to punish summarily contempt committed * * * in the actual view of the Court.' Fox, History of Contempt of Court, 49-52.
Whatever the conflicting views of scholars in construing more or less dubious manuscripts of the Fourteenth Century, what is indisputable is that from the foundation of the United States the constitutionality of the power to punish for contempt without the intervention of a jury has not been doubted. ”

“ To be sure, it is never too late for this Court to correct a misconception in an occasional decision, even on a rare occasion to change a rule of law that may have long persisted but also have long been questioned and only fluctuatingly applied. To say that everybody on the Court has been wrong for 150 years and that that which has been deemed part of the bone and sinew of the law should now be extirpated is quite another thing. ”

“ Law is a social organism, and evolution operates in the sociological domain no less than in the biological. The vitality and therefore validity of law is not arrested by the circumstances of its origin. What Magna Carta has become is very different indeed from the immediate objects of the barons at Runnymede. The fact that scholarship has shown that historical assumptions regarding the procedure for punishment of contempt of court were ill-founded, hardly wipes out a century and a half of the legislative and judicial history of federal law based on such assumptions. ”