- Person
- Louis Brandeis
- Lived
- 1856–1941
- Field
- Law
- From
- American
The story
By the early 1890s Louis Brandeis was a successful Boston lawyer. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish immigrants from Prague, he had graduated top of his class at Harvard Law School in 1877 and built a thriving practice with his classmate Samuel Warren. With his finances secure, he began to take on public causes. In 1891 he won his first important public victory, persuading the Massachusetts legislature to make the state's liquor laws more reasonable and enforceable.
One of his first public interest cases came in 1894, when he represented Alice N. Lincoln, a Boston philanthropist and well-known crusader for the poor. Lincoln had visited the city's public poorhouses for years and had seen inmates living in misery, with people who were only temporarily out of work housed together with the mentally ill and hardened criminals.
Brandeis took up the cause at public hearings, pressing for an investigation into conditions. He spent nine months on the case and held fifty-seven public hearings. At one he declared that men are not bad but are degraded largely by circumstances, and that it is the duty of everyone to help them up and give them hope. The evidence was persuasive: as a result of the hearings, Boston's board of aldermen ordered that the administration of the poor law be completely reorganised.
The case set the pattern for the rest of Brandeis's career, in which he used his legal skill on behalf of people who had no one else to speak for them. Two years later he led a successful fight against a transit company seeking control of Boston's new subway system, and in the following decades he took on the insurance industry and J. P. Morgan's railroad empire, usually refusing payment so that he could pursue the public interest freely. He became known as 'the People's Lawyer'.
In his 1911 book The Opportunity in the Law, he explained that the public was often poorly represented or not represented at all when laws were made, and urged young lawyers to fill that gap. His approach of gathering facts in public to win humane reform influenced generations of public interest lawyers.
Why it matters
The hearings forced Boston to overhaul the way it treated its poorest residents, and showed how a lawyer could use public evidence to win humane 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, the "People's Lawyer" on the Supreme CourtLouis Brandeis, known as "the People's Lawyer", became the first Jewish US Supreme Court justice in 1916 and wrote some of the greatest defences of free speech and privacy.
- 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.
Sources
- Louis Brandeis Wikipedia
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.