Abstract. Recently, S. Reich and S. Simons provided a novel proof of the Kirszbraun-Valentine extension theorem using Fenchel duality and Fitzpatrick functions. In the same spirit, we provide a new proof of an extension result for firmly nonexpansive mappings with an optimally localized range.Throughout this paper, we assume that X is a real Hilbert space, with inner product p = · | · and induced norm · , and we denote the identity mapping on X by Id. A mapping T from a subset D of X to X is called firmly nonexpansive ifequivalently [13,14], if 2T − Id is nonexpansive (Lipschitz continuous with constant 1), i.e.,Firmly nonexpansive mappings play an important role in various contexts; see, e.g., [1,2,3,7,8,9,10,15,17,21,22,25]. The Kirszbraun-Valentine theorem (see, e.g., [5,13,16,20,26]) states that any nonexpansive mapping can be extended to a nonexpansive mapping defined on the whole space. A beautiful proof of this result, based on Fenchel duality and Fitzpatrick functions, was recently provided by Reich and Simons [23]. (For further applications of Fitzpatrick functions, see, e.g., [4,24].) In this note, we refine their technique to obtain a new proof of an extension theorem for firmly nonexpansive mappings where the range of the extension is optimally localized. This extension theorem easily implies the Kirszbraun-Valentine result.Notation not explicitly defined in the following is standard in convex analysis; see, e.g., [27].