Felix Cohen

Felix Cohen (1907 to 1953) was an American legal scholar and attorney who shaped federal Indian law and policy in the twentieth century. A prominent figure in the Legal Realism movement, he challenged formalist jurisprudence in his widely cited 1935 article Transcendental Nonsense and the Functional Approach. As the principal legal architect of the Indian New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt, he drafted the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act and later compiled and authored the Handbook of Federal Indian Law in 1941, drawing generations of treaties, statutes, and court decisions into what became the foundation of the modern field. After leaving government service in 1947 he litigated Indian land claims, helped secure voting rights for Native Americans in New Mexico and Arizona, and worked on behalf of immigrant and ethnic minority rights until his death in 1953.