(Exploring his career on the United States Supreme Court, ...)
Exploring his career on the United States Supreme Court, an account of Brennan's contribution to the modern law on freedom of speech and the press notes his positions on civil rights, education, and capital punishment.
(The American legal system is the most significant in the ...)
The American legal system is the most significant in the world today, yet until recently there had not been a book that provided both the basic rules and the theoretical understanding necessary to comprehend it. Now, Fundamentals of American Law supplies these concepts to a number of audiences, ranging from students and scholars of law to business people and government officials; from those whose work regularly involves legal issues and who want to understand the law better than they do now, to the general reader who wants to gain a stronger appreciation of our legal system. In twenty-three chapters, the book looks at the overarching principles of American law, the seven subject areas primarily governed by the States, and the eight areas governed by Federal Law. Each chapter is written by an acknowledged expert in that area. All of the authors are on the faculty of the New York University School of Law, regarded as one of the elite law schools in America, and this work is offered as an element of its unique Global Law School Program. The book not only provides the reader with a solid foundation of American law, but will also serve as a basic reference book for years to come. Fundamentals of American Law is one volume anyone will want to have on hand to gain an understanding of our legal system.
William Joseph Brennan Jr. was an American judge and politician. He served as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, having served on the bench for more than 33 years. During this time he consistently championed libertarian rulings and an expanded interpretation of the Bill of Rights and the Civil War amendments.
Background
Mr. Brennan was born on April 25, 1906, in Newark, New Jersey, United States, the second child of William Joseph Brennan and Agnes McDermott Brennan. His father worked as a coal stoker at the Ballantine Brewery in Newark at the time of his son’s birth and soon became a union leader and, still later, a member of the Newark Board of Commissioners with oversight of the city’s police and fire departments.
Education
William Brennan attended a Catholic elementary school and then public schools until he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1924, where he obtained a degree in economics (Bachelor of Science) from the university’s Wharton School of Finance in 1928. Thereafter, he attended Harvard Law School, where he compiled a solid but not spectacular academic record. The editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review from his class, Paul Freund, would go on to be a prominent Harvard Law School professor, but the class’s only future Supreme Court justice did not manage to make the law review. In fact, few of his classmates at Harvard remembered him 25 years later when he was appointed to the Supreme Court.
A year before he finished law school, Brennan’s father died, leaving the family with no support and William Brennan himself in peril of being unable to finish his law school career. But with a scholarship from Harvard and work waiting on tables at a fraternity house, he was able to graduate from Harvard Law School in the spring of 1931, earning his Bachelor of Laws degree.
In 1931 Mr. Brennan took a job with a prominent Newark law firm where he rapidly became an expert in the area of labor law. By 1938 he had been made a partner in the firm, and later the firm made him a named partner. World War II intervened, though, and in July 1942 William Brennan began service in the army, first as a major and then as a lieutenant colonel with responsibility for manpower issues in the Ordnance Division. He ended his army career at the Pentagon, as chief of the Industrial Personnel Division, Labor Branch, upon which he returned to private practice with his old firm in September 1945. Four years later, though, New Jersey revamped its court system and the state governor, in an effort to staff the new courts with high-caliber judges, offered him a position on the newly formed Superior Court, a trial court. Brennan was reluctant to give up the financial security of private practice and the sizable income he earned from his firm, but he finally agreed to become a Superior Court judge. He did not remain long in this post, however. By 1950 he had been elevated to the court’s appellate division and, two years later, to the New Jersey Supreme Court.
William Brennan’s new career as a judge brought him new opportunities for public speaking, and he sometimes used these to express his opposition to the McCarthyism of the early 1950s. In two of his speeches of 1954, he made clear his distaste for the investigations that had blossomed in the nation’s capital and in many of its states seeking to identify communist infiltrators of important public positions. His sentences were a tangle of clauses, but their meaning was nevertheless clear enough. To the Charitable Irish Society meeting in Boston on Saint Patrick’s Day, Brennan declared that "the enemy deludes himself if he thinks he detects in some particles in the contemporary scene, reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts, any sign that our courage has failed us and that fear has palsied our hard-won concept of justice and fair play." Later that year he returned to this theme in an address to Rotarians: "A system of inquisition on mere suspicion or gossip without independent proofs tending to show guilt is innately abhorrent to us."
On October 15, 1956, Associate Justice Sherman Minton resigned from the Supreme Court. President Eisenhower had already listened to complaints about the composition of the Court and had determined that his next appointment to the Court would be a Catholic and a person with state court judicial experience. Mr. Brennan had recently given a speech about judicial administration in Washington that had impressed Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell. This impression, combined with Mr. Brennan’s Catholic background and his substantial experience on the New Jersey courts, won him the nomination to fill the vacant seat on the Supreme Court. He first served an interim appointment beginning on October 16, 1956.
After Congress convened, the president sent forward William Brennan’s nomination on January 14, 1957. Had the Senate been able to foresee the future course of Brennan’s judicial temperament, it might have tarried longer over his confirmation. As it was, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, troubled by Brennan’s veiled criticisms of his anti-communist investigations, cast the only dissenting vote against Brennan’s confirmation on March 19, 1957.
Baker v. Carr (1962), one of his most important opinions, would be emblematic of developments to come. The case involved the question of whether federal courts could be used as a forum to attack the constitutionality of voting districts. At the time, urban voters complained that voting districts at both the federal and the state level were designed in such a way that sparsely populated rural areas had substantially more power within the political process than more heavily populated urban areas. This, they urged, denied urban voters the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Constitution. But in early challenges to voter districting patterns, the Supreme Court refused to be drawn into this fierce conflict, insisting that the manner in which voter districts were drawn up was essentially a political question in which the Court should take no part. Mr. Brennan’s opinion for the Court in Baker v. Carr revisited the issue and concluded that the Court, indeed, had the authority to determine whether particular groups of voters were denied equal protection of the law by the way voting districts were drawn. The case became a watershed as the Court found in subsequent cases such as Reynolds v. Sims (1964) that the constitutional principle of equality required that one person’s vote have roughly the same weight as another’s: the "one person, one vote" principle.
Mr. Brennan enjoyed the greatest influence on the Court while Earl Warren was its chief justice. But even after more conservative chief justices assumed their seats on the Court - first Warren E. Burger and then William H. Rehnquist - William Brennan continued to play an important part in the Court’s decisions and to see the revolution accomplished by the Warren court sustained and even expanded in some areas. William Brennan finally convinced a majority of the Court to accord greater suspicion of laws that discriminated on the basis of gender in Craig v. Boren (1976), and he helped secure at least a limited constitutional blessing for affirmative action programs in cases such as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) and Metro Broadcasting v. Federal Communications Commission (1990). Even at the very end of his tenure on the Court, he was able to lead a majority of the justices to overturn flag desecration laws in Texas v. Johnson (1989) and United States v. Eichman (1990) because, he explained to the Court, they violated the First Amendment right to free speech. Soon after these final victories, Brennan suffered a stroke that forced him to resign from the Court on July 20, 1990.
The willingness to use the Court’s power to address fundamental questions of right and fairness became a core feature of Justice Brennan’s judicial philosophy. Another was his conviction that the Constitution could not be measured simply in terms of the specific expectations of its framers, but that it must be given life within contemporary contexts frequently unforeseen by its original architects. Thus he was prepared to revisit the intersection of libel laws and free speech in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), during the civil rights era, by limiting the ability of public officials to sue the press for statements critical of their conduct. And he was willing to use the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause to challenge discrimination on the basis of gender in Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), even though 19th-century framers of the amendment may have been quite comfortable with laws that discriminated between men and women. Finally, in Goldberg v. Kelly (1970), William Brennan contemplated the modern welfare state, in which individuals regularly rely on various forms of welfare payments from governments and found that these payments were a kind of "property" to which the procedural protections of due process should apply.
(a collection of his opinions and speeches drawn from his ...)
1967
Religion
An avowed Roman Catholic, Mr. Brennan nonetheless believed in the importance of a division between church and state.
Politics
William Brennan was a lifelong Democrat. He had a humanist vision for the law, believing in the fundamental rights of individuals, with Supreme Court analysts considering his decisions highly influential. He supported decisions that were in favor of U.S. citizens having the right to petition the federal court system; Brennan was also a major advocate of individuals having appropriate due process when it comes to government bureaucracy.
Brennan also supported court rulings that supported Affirmative Action programs, gender equality and a woman's right to choose. And along with fellow jurist Thurgood Marshall, he was adamantly against the death penalty.
Views
Quotations:
"The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to 'create' rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting."
"We must meet the challenge rather than wish it were not before us."
"If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable."
"The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs."
"We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as Twentieth Century Americans. We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time. For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs."
"We cannot let colorblindness become myopia which masks the reality that many "created equal" have been treated within our lifetimes as inferior both by the law and by their fellow citizens."
"The quest for freedom, dignity, and the rights of man will never end."
"After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized that the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary."
"If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion."
"Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent."
"If our free society is to endure, and I know it will, those who govern must recognize that the Framers of the Constitution limited their power in order to preserve human dignity and the air of freedom which is our proudest heritage."
Connections
Mr. Brennan got married to Marjorie Leanord. They were the parents of three children: William III, Hugh, and Nancy. Brennan's wife Marjorie died in 1982. A few months later, in 1983 when he was 77 years old, he married Mary Fowler, who had served as his secretary for 26 years.
The Conscience of the Court: Selected Opinions of Justice William J. Brennan Jr. on Freedom and Equality
The Conscience of the Court celebrates the work of Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who served on the United States Supreme Court for thirty-four years (19561990). Stephen L. Sepinuck and Mary Pat Treuthart introduce and present selected judicial opinions written by Justice Brennan on issues involving personal freedom, civil liberties, and equality. Brennan is ranked by many as the best writer ever to have served on the Supreme Court, and his written opinions depict real people, often in desperate, emotional situations. Remarkable for their clarity of analysis, for their eloquence, and for their forcefulness and persuasiveness, his opinions demonstrate that judicial thought need not be a proprietary enclave of lawyers or the intellectual elite. The extended excerpts selected by Sepinuck and Treuthart highlight Brennan's approach to judicial decision making. Concerned always with how each decision would actually affect people's lives, Brennan possessed a rare quality of empathy. In Brennan, the editors note, "people and groups who lacked influence in societyCommunists and flag burners, children and foreigners, criminal defendants and racial minorities"found a champion they could count on "to listen to their causes and judge them unmoved by the passions of the politically powerful." In their introduction to each opinion, the editors provide background facts, discuss how the excerpted opinion transformed the law or otherwise fit into the realm of constitutional jurisprudence, and delve into Justice Brennan's judicial philosophy, his method of constitutional interpretation, and the language he used. The Conscience of the Court celebrates the work of Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who served on the United States Supreme Court for thirty-four years (19561990). Stephen L. Sepinuck and Mary Pat Treuthart introduce and present selected judicial opinions written by Justice Brennan on issues involving personal freedom, civil liberties, and equality. Brennan is ranked by many as the best writer ever to have served on the Supreme Court, and his written opinions depict real people, often in desperate, emotional situations. Remarkable for their clarity of analysis, for their eloquence, and for their forcefulness and persuasiveness, his opinions demonstrate that judicial thought need not be a proprietary enclave of lawyers or the intellectual elite. The extended excerpts selected by Sepinuck and Treuthart highlight Brennan's approach to judicial decision making. Concerned always with how each decision would actually affect people's lives, Brennan possessed a rare quality of empathy. In Brennan, the editors note, "people and groups who lacked influence in societyCommunists and flag burners, children and foreigners, criminal defendants and racial minorities"found a champion they could count on "to listen to their causes and judge them unmoved by the passions of the politically powerful." In their introduction to each opinion, the editors provide background facts, discuss how the excerpted opinion transformed the law or otherwise fit into the realm of constitutional jurisprudence, and delve into Justice Brennan's judicial philosophy, his method of constitutional interpretation, and the language he used. The Conscience of the Court celebrates the work of Justice William J. Brennan Jr., who served on the United States Supreme Court for thirty-four years (19561990). Stephen L. Sepinuck and Mary Pat Treuthart introduce and present selected judicial opinions written by Justice Brennan on issues involving personal freedom, civil liberties, and equality. Brennan is ranked by many as the best writer ever to have served on the Supreme Court, and his written opinions depict real people, often in desperate, emotional situations. Remarkable for their clarity of analysis, for their eloquence, and for their forcefulness and persuasiveness, his opinions demonstrate that judicial thought need not be a proprietary enclave of lawyers or the intellectual elite. The extended excerpts selected by Sepinuck and Treuthart highlight Brennan's approach to judicial decision making. Concerned always with how each decision would actually affect people's lives, Brennan possessed a rare quality of empathy. In Brennan, the editors note, "people and groups who lacked influence in societyCommunists and flag burners, children and foreigners, criminal defendants and racial minorities"found a champion they could count on "to listen to their causes and judge them unmoved by the passions of the politically powerful." In their introduction to each opinion, the editors provide background facts, discuss how the excerpted opinion transformed the law or otherwise fit into the realm of constitutional jurisprudence, and delve into Justice Brennan's judicial philosophy, his method of constitutional interpretation, and the language he used.
1999
The Jurisprudence of Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.
This close analysis of Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.'s, jurisprudence on the eve of his death on July 24, 1997, demonstrates why Brennan deserves to be recognized as the most important liberal jurist of the twentieth century. David E. Marion offers a careful review of Brennan's opinions that clarifies his defense of libertarian dignity and illustrates the profound political and constitutional impact of Brennan's opinions on public discourse and government policy. This is must reading for anyone interested in the role of the judiciary in modern American public life.