- Person
- Louis Brandeis
- Lived
- 1856–1941
- Field
- Law
- From
- American
The story
Louis Brandeis was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1856 to Jewish immigrants from Prague in Bohemia. He entered Harvard Law School at 18 and, despite failing eyesight that forced him to pay classmates to read to him, graduated in 1877 as valedictorian with the highest grade average in the school's history, a record that stood for eight decades. In 1890 he co-wrote a Harvard Law Review article on 'The Right to Privacy' that, in the words of the legal scholar Roscoe Pound, added nothing less than a chapter to American law.
Once his Boston law practice made him financially secure, he devoted most of his time to public causes without pay, fighting for workers, consumers and small investors against powerful monopolies, and earned the nickname 'the People's Lawyer'. He also changed how cases are argued. His 'Brandeis brief' in Muller v. Oregon (1908) used more than a hundred pages of facts from doctors, social workers and factory inspectors, not only legal precedent, to show the real-world effects of long working hours, setting a new standard for evidence.
On 28 January 1916 President Woodrow Wilson nominated him to the Supreme Court. Opposition from business leaders, former President William Howard Taft and several former heads of the American Bar Association was fierce, and historians have noted that much of it was driven by antisemitism. For the first time, the Senate Judiciary Committee held public hearings on a nomination. After four months the Senate approved him on 1 June 1916 by 47 votes to 22, making him the first Jewish justice, and he took the oath on 5 June.
In 23 years on the bench, he wrote opinions that legal scholars count among the greatest defences of freedom of speech and the right to privacy ever written by a member of the Court, including his concurrence in Whitney v. California and his dissent in Olmstead v. United States. He is regularly ranked among the greatest justices in the Court's history.
Brandeis retired in 1939 and died in 1941. Brandeis University in Massachusetts, the law school of the University of Louisville and Kibbutz Ein Hashofet in Israel bear his name, and in 2009 the US Postal Service put him on a stamp as a champion of free speech and privacy.
Why it matters
Brandeis helped give Americans a legal right to privacy and stronger protection for free speech, and his evidence-based briefs changed how courts weigh social reform.
About Louis Brandeis
“The People’s Lawyer” who became the first Jewish Supreme Court justice in 1916, wrote classic defences of free speech and privacy, and led American Zionism.
More about Louis Brandeis
- Louis Brandeis took on J. P. Morgan's railroad monopolyFrom 1907 Louis Brandeis fought unpaid for nine years to stop J. P. Morgan's New Haven Railroad monopolising New England's railways, and his warnings proved right.
- Louis Brandeis defended "the right to be let alone"Louis Brandeis's 1928 dissent against warrantless wiretapping in Olmstead v. United States was vindicated in 1967, when the Supreme Court overturned Olmstead in Katz v. United States.
- Louis Brandeis brought fair life insurance to workersAfter finding that most low-wage workers' life insurance policies lapsed unpaid, Louis Brandeis created Massachusetts savings bank life insurance, signed into law in 1907.
- Louis Brandeis called sunlight the best disinfectantIn a 1913 Harper's Weekly article Louis Brandeis wrote that "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants", a line that still defines the case for open government.
- Louis Brandeis wrote a classic defence of free speechLouis Brandeis's 1927 opinion in Whitney v. California has been praised as perhaps the greatest defence of free speech ever written by a Supreme Court justice.
- Louis Brandeis helped design the Federal Trade CommissionLouis Brandeis urged Woodrow Wilson to give the government real power to enforce antitrust law and became one of the architects of the Federal Trade Commission.
- Louis Brandeis held 57 hearings to reform Boston poorhousesIn 1894 Louis Brandeis spent nine months and held 57 public hearings on Boston's poorhouses, leading the city to completely reorganise how it cared for the poor.
Sources
- Louis Brandeis Wikipedia
- Brandeis, Louis Dembitz Federal Judicial Center
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.