For a time, he was sharply and vocally at odds with a colleague on the bench, Charles Edward Clark, "over a whole range of common law precepts". Frank's scholarly tendency bled over into his judicial opinions, some of which were notoriously lengthy. One anecdote relayed about this aspect of Frank's work tells of a law clerk who had objected to the length of one of Frank's opinions. According to the story:  As a judge, Frank wrote the opinion in February 1952 affirming the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. In reviewing the case as part of a three-judge panel, Frank rejected each of the Rosenbergs' arguments on appeal. Frank denied that the death penalty imposed on the Rosenbergs was cruel and unusual punishment, but privately he had advised trial judge Irving Kaufman not to sentence the Rosenbergs to death. In his opinion, he also suggested that the Supreme Court might want to revisit the questions about the death penalty for crimes similar to treason. In a related case, however, Frank dissented from his two colleagues by voting to grant a new trial to an accused third conspirator, Morton Sobell. The jury, according to Frank, should have been permitted to decide whether Sobell had joined the other conspirators in their plan to send atomic information from Los Alamos to the Soviets, or had merely engaged in a separate, less significant conspiracy with Julius Rosenberg to transmit non-atomic information. In "United States v. Roth", Frank wrote a concurring opinion to the decision, which affirmed the obscenity conviction of a criminal defendant. In a lengthy appendix to his concurring opinion, Frank "drew on a host of historical, literary, and social science studies to point to the dangers and contradiction of all forms of government censorship of ideas and images". The case was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court the following year, in "Roth v. United States", which noted Frank's approach. The concurrence has been asserted to be one of Frank's most important opinions, and one which set the stage for the direction the Supreme Court would take on such issues beginning in the 1960s. Frank's judicial service did not stem his scholarly output. In 1942, he published "If Men Were Angels", a defense of the ambitious New Deal programs, and governmental regulation in general, expressing views that he developed while serving in the SEC. In 1945, he published "Fate and Freedom", which attacked the theoretical underpinnings of Marxism, denying that societies followed any strict progression and insisting that people were free to mold the development of their own society.