Felix Solomon Cohen (July 3, 1907 – October 19, 1953) was an American lawyer and scholar who made a lasting mark on legal philosophy and fundamentally shaped federal Indian law and policy. Biography 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 became a leading figure in Legal Realism, a legal movement that challenged the Formalist idea that legal principles could be discerned in the abstract, separate from their enforcement, judicial interpretation, or impact on society. 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 remains among the most-cited law review articles ever written. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration brought Cohen from academic study to public service. Cohen worked in the Solicitor's Office of the Department of the Interior from 1933 to 1947. In this position, Cohen was the primary legal architect of the Indian New Deal, a federal policy that sought to strengthen tribal governments and reduce federal domination of Indian tribes. Cohen was the drafter of the centerpiece legislation of this era, the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. In his research on Indian law, he was assisted by his wife Lucy Kramer Cohen (1907-2007). She had studied mathematics and anthropology at Barnard College in the 1920s and earned her master's degree in mathematics from Columbia University. With background in anthropology, economics, and statistics, she had worked for anthropology professor Franz Boas. In 1939 Felix Cohen became Chief of the Indian Law Survey, an effort to compile the federal laws and treaties regarding American Indians. The resulting book, published in 1941 as The Handbook of Federal Indian Law, became much more than a simple survey. The Handbook was the first to show how hundreds of years of diverse treaties, statutes, and decisions formed a comprehensive whole. Today, Cohen is credited with creating the modern field of Federal Indian Law. Although the treatise began as a joint project between the Department of Interior and the Department of Justice, Justice fired Cohen from the project and