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RESUMEN

Louis Dembitz Brandeis (Nov. 13, 1858 – Oct. 5, 1941), lawyer and associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to immigrants from Bohemia (now Czechia). His parents, Adolph and Fredericka Dembitz Brandeis, were educated, secular Jews who fled their homeland in light of Bohemia’s failed 1848 revolution. They viewed the United States as a place where “progress is the triumph of the rights of man” and considered democracy essential in securing man’s right to self-development, values that shaped their son’s legal career as a champion of individual rights.

Brandeis graduated from the Louisville Male High School at age fourteen. Soon after, his family relocated to Europe in anticipation of an economic downturn in the United States. After a brief period of travel, Louis moved to Dresden, Germany, and spent two years studying at the Annenschule. Inspired by his time in Germany and by his uncle, Lewis Dembitz, Brandeis returned to the United States to study law. At the age of twenty, Brandeis graduated with a Bachelor of Law degree from Harvard Law School and, after an additional year of legal study, he was allowed to practice law at the age of twenty-one. Brandeis is recognized as having achieved one of the most outstanding academic records in the Law School’s history, holding the record for highest grade point average as of 2020.

In 1879, Brandeis accepted an offer from former Harvard classmate Samuel D. Warren to set up a law firm in Boston. As a partner in his law firm, Louis worked as a consultant and as a litigator preferring the role of ‘advisor’ to ‘strategist’. In 1889, a decade after the founding of the Warren and Brandeis, Louis’ founding partner, Samuel, withdrew from the firm to tend to personal affairs. Before parting, Warren and Brandeis published one of the most famous and influential law articles in history, “The Right to Privacy,” printed in the December 1890 edition of the Harvard Law Review. Brandeis would go on to become a pioneer of privacy rights in American legal theory, almost single handedly “adding a chapter” to United States law.

In March of 1891, Brandeis married his second cousin, Alice Goldmark, and moved to Beacon Hill where he and his wife raised two daughters, Susan Brandeis Gilbert, and Elizabeth Brandeis Rauschenbusch. Soon after Warren’s departure from the firm, Brandeis began to take on cases that dealt more directly with the public interest, often on a pro bono basis. In 1891, he persuaded the Massachusetts legislature to relax state liquor laws insisting that, by making them more reasonable, the state would disincentivize liquor dealers from bribing lawmakers instead of complying with existing laws.

In 1894 he represented a client in defense of Boston’s public poorhouses and the conditions of its inmates, holding fifty-seven public hearings over the course of nine months in defense of the rights of all men, including poor, mentally ill, unemployed men. In 1896 he led the fight against a Boston transit company that aimed to control the emerging subway system ─an early victory in his career against monopolies and big corporations. Brandeis was an advocate of the right of law to change, and the need for law to change when circumstances necessitate it. He was also outspoken in opposition to corruption in politics and misgovernment in Boston, going as far as drafting a law that made it a punishable crime for a public servant to solicit a favor from a regulated public utility, or for an officer of such a company to offer such favors.

Brandeis was a moderate anti-imperialist. During the Spanish-American War he was a member of the Boston based "Committee of Fifteen," a forerunner to the Philippine Information Society, whose goal was to provide accurate information to Americans concerning the islands’ struggles with Spanish rule. While he was a subscriber to the Boston Anti-Imperialist League’s journal he ignored an invitation to serve as one of the association’s vice-presidents. He also corresponded with Sixto López, secretary of the Philippine mission sent to the United States in 1898 to negotiate American recognition of the islands’ independence. In a November 27 1900 letter Brandeis encouraged Lopez to address the Harvard Spanish Club led by J.D.M. Ford, but on the same day discouraged another Boston progressive Elizabeth Glendower Evans who wanted Lopez to meet with the author Mark Twain. Brandeis viewed Twain as too flippant and lacking the respectability required for leadership of the anti-imperialist cause. Louis and Alice Brandeis’s friendship with Ford and Glendower Evans, as well as their support for Cuban and Philippine independence may have encouraged the couple to support the Harvard Summer School for Cuban teachers. They donated $50 to that campaign.

By the early 1900s, Brandeis was refusing payment for any public interest cases he took on, eventually being dubbed “the people’s lawyer.” By the time President Woodrow Wilson nominated him to the Supreme Court on January 28, 1916, Brandeis had already argued before the Court, pioneered a new type of legal document known as the ‘Brandeis Brief’, developed a new life insurance system, and dealt major blows to monopolies nationwide through extensive research and advocacy work.

On June 1, 1916, after four months of bitter contestations in the Senate, Brandeis’ was finally confirmed by a vote of 47 to 22. Although there was a degree of anti-Semitism among those opposing the nomination it was his reputation as a trust-busting critic of the power of corporations that explains the relatively high vote against him. As an associate justice, Louis Brandeis was a fierce advocate of freedom of speech and the right to privacy, but somewhat less progressive on racial equality: one opinion upheld racially restrictive covenants, another upheld a Virginia compulsory sterilization law.

Brandeis retired from the Supreme Court on February 13, 1939, and died on October 5, 1941, at the age of 84, in Washington D.C. following a heart attack. He remains one of the most influential legal scholars in United States history.


Further Reading.

Collections of Brandeis’s papers can be found at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, and the Harvard Law School Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1. Rosen, Jeffrey. Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet (2016).

2. Urofsky, Melvin I. Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (2009).

3. Urofsky, Melvin and David W. Levy, eds. Letters of Louis D. Brandeis: 1870-1907 (1971).

4. Obituary: New York Times, Oct. 6, 1941