Philip Elman (March 14, 1918 – November 30, 1999) was an American lawyer at the United States Department of Justice and former member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
After a brief stint at the Federal Communications Commission (1940–1941), he served as a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter from 1941 to 1943.
Among the opinions Elman was involved in drafting during his clerkship was Frankfurter's dissent in the second Flag Salute case, West Virginia State Board of Education v.
He explained how the Solicitor General's brief used the phrase "with all deliberate speed": It's because we were the first to suggest, and all the parties and amicus on both sides rejected it after the government proposed it, that if the Court should hold that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional, it should give the district courts a reasonable period of time to work out the details and timing of the implementation of the decision.
[4] One of Elman's assistants at the FTC was a young Richard Posner, who went on to become a professor at University of Chicago Law School and a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
[7] Elman admitted in his oral history that he and Justice Frankfurter conferred privately about the intended remedy in the case, which technically constituted a breach of judicial ethics.