Felix S. Cohen

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Felix Solomon Cohen (1907-1953) was a lawyer and legal scholar who developed an interest and expertise in law concerning natural resources, statehood and economic development for American territories, Indian affairs, and immigration and minority problems.

Felix S. Cohen was born in Manhattan, New York in 1907 and grew up in Yonkers. Cohen attended the City College of New York, and received an M.A. and Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1927 and 1929, respectively. Cohen entered Columbia Law School in 1928 and graduated in 1931. He was the legislation and book review editor of the Columbia Law Review, serving under Editor-in-Chief Herbert Wechsler.

Cohen worked in the Solicitor's Office of the Department of the Interior from 1933-1947. In 1939 he became Chief of the Indian Law Survey, which was an effort to compile the federal laws and treaties regarding American Indians. Cohen helped edit the survey that was eventually published as The Handbook of Federal Indian Law. For this work, Cohen received the department's Distinguished Service Award in 1948.

Cohen entered private legal practice in 1948, but concurrently taught legal philosophy at Yale Law School, The City College of New York, and Rutgers Law School. In 1951 Cohen published Readings in Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy with his father, Professor Morris R. Cohen. His major articles are anthologized in The Legal Conscience: Selected Papers of Felix S. Cohen (Lucy K. Cohen ed., 1970).

Cohen was a leading figure in American Legal Realism, a movement of legal scholarship suspicious of legal terms of art and formalism. The Realists sought a realistic view of the law, examining data from fields like psychology, sociology, and economics to bolster their understanding of how law actually works. Cohen's most famous contribution to this debate was "Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach," which ran in the Columbia Law Review in 1935 and is among the most-cited law review articles ever written.

In private practice, Cohen helped American Indians get voting rights in states (Arizona and New Mexico) that had denied them the franchise well into the twentieth century.