Background
He was born on November 13, 1856, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish immigrant parents from Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), who raised him in a secular home.
Brandeis enrolled in Harvard Law School, where, in the course of his two years of study, he earned the highest grades ever awarded by the school. The law school nearly declined to graduate Brandeis, though, since he was, at 20 years of age, a year younger than the normally required 21 years. But the school made an exception for Brandeis, and he stayed on another year for additional graduate work.
Louis Brandeis
Brandeis enrolled in Harvard Law School, where, in the course of his two years of study, he earned the highest grades ever awarded by the school. The law school nearly declined to graduate Brandeis, though, since he was, at 20 years of age, a year younger than the normally required 21 years. But the school made an exception for Brandeis, and he stayed on another year for additional graduate work.
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
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1911
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
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1912
(Illustrated with 10 unique illustrations. While Louis D. ...)
Illustrated with 10 unique illustrations. While Louis D. Brandeis's series of articles on the money trust was running in Harper's Weekly many inquiries came about publication in more accessible permanent form. Even without such urgence through the mail, however, it would have been clear that these articles inevitably constituted a book, since they embodied an analysis and a narrative by that mind which, on the great industrial movements of our era, is the most expert in the United States. The inquiries meant that the attentive public recognized that here was a contribution to history. Here was the clearest and most profound treatment ever published on that part of our business development which, as President Wilson and other wise men have said, has come to constitute the greatest of our problems. The story of our time is the story of industry. No scholar of the future will be able to describe our era with authority unless he comprehends that expansion and concentration which followed the harnessing of steam and electricity, the great uses of the change, and the great excesses. No historian of the future, in my opinion, will find among our contemporary documents so masterful an analysis of why concentration went astray. I am but one among many who look upon jMr. Brandeis as having, in the field of economics, the most inventive and sound mind of our time. While his articles were running in Harper's Weekly I had ample opportunity to know how widespread was the belief among intelligent men that this brilliant diagnosis of our money trust was the most important contribution to current thought in many years. "Great" is one of the words that I do not use loosely, and I look upon Mr. Brandeis as a great man. In the composition of his intellect, one of the most important elements is his comprehension of figures. As one of the leading financiers of the country said to me, "Mr. Brandeis's greatness as a lawyer is part of his greatness as a mathematician." My views on this subject are sufficiently indicated in the following editorial in Harper's Weekly.
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1914
(This book was first published in 1914. The author Louis D...)
This book was first published in 1914. The author Louis Dembitz Brandeis, was an American lawyer and associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939. This book, “Business - A Profession”, Brandeis' second book, is a collection of speeches and magazine articles written before his ascension to the Supreme Court. Though it was published long ago, still you will find information helpful in the modern era.
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1914
(The Making of the Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926 collectio...)
The Making of the Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926 collection provides descriptions of the major trials from over 300 years, with official trial documents, unofficially published accounts of the trials, briefs and arguments and more. Readers can delve into sensational trials as well as those precedent-setting trials associated with key constitutional and historical issues and discover, including the Amistad Slavery case, the Dred Scott case and Scopes "monkey" trial.Trials provides unfiltered narrative into the lives of the trial participants as well as everyday people, providing an unparalleled source for the historical study of sex, gender, class, marriage and divorce.
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1918
(A collection of thirty-two of Brandeis' addresses and sta...)
A collection of thirty-two of Brandeis' addresses and statements convey the evolution of his views regarding Zionism. Brandeis, a Boston lawyer known for his liberal stand on issues of social justice, was the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court (1916-1939). The collection includes "True Americanism," "A Call to the Educated Jew," and "Democracy Means Responsibility." In his Foreword Frankfurter calls Brandeis "the moral symbol of Zionism throughout the world."
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1942
(With the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912, Louis D. Bra...)
With the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912, Louis D. Brandeis emerged as the undisputed intellectual leader of those reformers who were trying to recreate a democratic society free from the economic and political depradations of monopolistic enterprise. But now these reformers had a champion in the White House, and direct access to him through one of his most trusted advisers. In this volume we see what was probably the high point of progressive reform - the first three years of the Wilson Administration. During these years Brandeis was considered for a Cabinet position, consulted frequently on matters of patronage, and called in at key junctures to determine policy. But he still kept up his many obligations to different reform groups: arguing cases before the Supreme Court, acting as public counsel in rate hearings, writing Other People’s Money, one of the key exposés of the era, as well as advising his good friend Robert M. LaFollette and other reform leaders. Yet at the height of his career as a reformer, Brandeis suddenly took on another heavy obligation, the leadership of the American Zionist movement, and helped marshal Jews in this country to aid their brethren in war-ravaged Europe and Palestine. Carrying over his democratic ideals, he challenged the established American Jewish aristocracy in the Congress movement, in order to broaden the base of Jewish participation in important issues. At the end of 1915, Brandeis was an important figure not only in domestic reform and Jewish affairs, but on the international scene as well. And although no one knew it at the time, he stood at the brink of nomination to the nation’s highest court. As in the earlier volumes, these letters indicate the inner workings of American reform, and they also show how American Zionism, under the leadership of Brandeis and his lieutenants, assumed those characteristics that would make it a unique and powerful instrument in world politics.
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1973
(Philippa Strum, our foremost authority on Louis Brandeis,...)
Philippa Strum, our foremost authority on Louis Brandeis, gathers together for the first time a sterling selection from his most provocative and profound writings. A kind of "Portable Brandeis," this book provides a concise and readable guide to the thought of a truly great American. Brandeis, the Ralph Nader of the early twentieth century, was known as the "People's Attorney" for his continuous crusades on behalf of the public. He spoke before citizens' groups and legislative bodies, wrote articles for popular magazines, put his ideas about industrial democracy in the briefs he submitted as a lawyer and later in the opinions he wrote as a Supreme Court justice (1916-1938), and advised presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. The problems Brandeis faced and the answers he fashioned could have leaped from today's newspapers: corruption in government, conflicts between majority rule and minority rights, movements to limit free speech and the right to privacy, gender equality, the importance of education, the causes of and possible solutions for poverty, the social costs of excessive political or corporate power, the uneasy relationship between lawyers and the public, efficiency and justice in the workplace, the tension between Federal power and states' autonomy, and the responsibility of citizens to their community. In all his endeavors, Brandeis emphasized both political and economic democracy, citizen participation, and a balance between rights and responsibilities. As leader of the American Zionist movement from 1914 through the 1930s, he dreamed of a democratic Jewish homeland in Palestine founded on Jeffersonian principles. And there were similar echoes of the Founding Fathers in his campaign against the corporate trusts in the United States. These selections from Brandeis's speeches, letters to family and colleagues, newspaper interviews, articles, and judicial opinions offer us the essence of Brandeis's genius and allow us to appreciate the range and relevance of his ideas for America today.
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1995
(Widely regarded as a leading progressive reformer as well...)
Widely regarded as a leading progressive reformer as well as a major figure in Constitutional history, Louis D. Brandeis was an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939. Liberals and conservatives alike consistently rate him as one of the few truly great jurists to serve on that court. Until now, only Brandeis's professional correspondence has been available in print. Here, Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy present the private correspondence between Brandeis and his immediate family, particularly his wife and two daughters, Elizabeth and Susan. Not only do the letters reveal much about progressive politics and personalities, they also reveal Brandeis the person. Author of the "right to privacy" doctrine, Brandeis jealously guarded his personal life. He enjoyed the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He liked to hike and canoe. As a husband and father, he faced the same problems and frustrations faced by every spouse and parent. He relished a good joke yet carefully restricted this side to this family and a few close friends. While many who came in contact with him thought him cold and remote, those closest to him saw the human side behind the mantle of Supreme Court justice.
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2002
(The letters in this volume record an important transition...)
The letters in this volume record an important transition in Brandeis’s life. In July 1907, when the letters begin, Louis D. Brandeis was merely an unusually successful local reformer. His earlier victories against the Boston Elevated and the Boston Consolidated Gas Company, even his stunning success in the achievement of the Savings Bank Life Insurance law in Massachusetts, all centered exclusively upon Boston or Massachusetts problems. But by December 1912, when this book ends, Brandeis was one of the best known social activists in the United States. He received regular national attention in popular periodicals and advised the newly elected President of the United States. As these letters show, Brandeis always kept one eye on Massachusetts affairs - supervising the inauguration of the insurance reform, continuing to oppose long-term franchises for the subway, and advising Massachusetts governors on proposed bills and prospective appointments. But he devoted the major part of his energy in this five-and-a-half-year period to a series of crusades of crucial national importance. He attacked the attempt of Mellen and Morgan to gain a monopoly hold over new England transportation as he strenuously and doggedly opposed the merger of the Boston & Maine with the New Haven railroad. He entered, in a leading role, the most celebrated conservation battle of his generation, the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy, and he emerged as a major spokesman for the preservation and orderly development of natural resources. He helped to hammer together an arbitration mechanism to maintain industrial peace within the New York garment trades, a mechanism he believed would have broad implications for the future of industrial democracy in America. He battled the demands of the railroads for increased rates; he joined the crusade for efficiency and scientific management; and he directed repeated blows against the huge concentrations of economic power within the national economy. It should not be surprising that Brandeis and Robert M. LaFollette were drawn together, and these letters will show both the extent of that relationship and the way in which Brandeis’s influence spread to other progressives in Congress. Other matters - his earliest Zionist activities, his achievement in defending progressive state legislation before the Supreme Court, his interest in Alaskan development along conservationist lines, his plan for the regularity of employment, his role in the Presidential campaign of 1912 - are all part of his work during these turbulent years and are all touched upon in greater or lesser detail in these letters.
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He was born on November 13, 1856, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish immigrant parents from Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), who raised him in a secular home.
At the age of 16, Louis Brandeis gained entrance into the Annen-Realschule in Dresden, Germany, where he proved to be an excellent student. When his family returned to the United States in 1875, he enrolled in Harvard Law School, where, in the course of his two years of study, he earned the highest grades ever awarded by the school. The law school nearly declined to graduate Brandeis, though, since he was, at 20 years of age, a year younger than the normally required 21 years. But the school made an exception for Brandeis, and he stayed on another year for additional graduate work.
After graduation Brandeis headed to Saint Louis to work for a law firm there, only to find himself restless for the legal environs of New England. Thus, when his classmate Samuel Warren suggested they form a partnership in Boston, Brandeis leaped at the opportunity. Beginning in 1879, the two soon established a prosperous practice, representing mostly small and medium-sized businesses.
The following years saw Brandeis develop a reputation as a lawyer who knew as much about his clients’ businesses as he did about the law. This fact centered legal practice would come to characterize much of his approach to the law. Not content to ponder abstract legal principles in a vacuum, Brandeis excelled at plunging into the thicket of factual detail and the sociological background of his clients’ problems, often becoming a general adviser to them, not only about the law but about the needs of their businesses. With his partner, Samuel Warren, he also wrote a seminal legal article titled “The Right to Privacy,” published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890. This article, as much as any other scholarly work, formed the foundation for the recognition of a right to privacy in a wide variety of legal contexts. Throughout most of this decade, Brandeis also waged war against the monopolistic aspirations of the Boston Elevated Railway. His involvement in this public issue was one of the first of many occasions when he applied his legal talents for the public good, often without receiving compensation. In fact, Brandeis contributed so much of his professional time to such cases that he eventually believed it necessary to reimburse his law firm for the value of the time he dispensed free of charge on public matters, laboring, as he would become known, as “the people’s lawyer.”
By the turn of the century, Louis Brandeis had already achieved prominence as a progressive reformer. He supported unions as a necessary counterweight to the growing power of corporations. In 1908 he made a famous appearance before the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the National Consumers’ League to defend an Oregon law setting maximum hours for female workers in Mueller v. Oregon (1908). Since the Court had held only three years previously in Lochner versus New York (1905) that a maximum-hours law for bakers unconstitutionally infringed on the right of contract, Brandeis faced formidable obstacles in persuading the Court to uphold the Oregon law. He eventually prevailed, however, partly on the strength of an innovative brief that devoted a mere two pages to discussion of the applicable legal precedents and the remainder to a detailed presentation of sociological data supporting his contention that excessive work hours were harmful to women. This kind of brief, later emulated by other lawyers, came to be known as a “Brandéis brief.”
When President Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis Brandéis to the Supreme Court in 1916 to replace Justice Joseph R. Lamar, it was inevitable that corporate interests would rally to oppose the appointment of “the people’s lawyer. ” The battle over his confirmation raged for four months, but the Senate eventually confirmed Brandéis as the Court’s first Jewish justice on June 1, 1916, by a vote of 47-22. He took his seat on the Court four days later and began what would be a 22-year career of service on the Supreme Court.
By the end of the 1930s, Brandeis was 83 years old and found the responsibilities of his position increasingly difficult to bear. He retired on February 13, 1939, and died of a heart attack two years later on October 5, 1941, in Washington, D. C.
(The Making of the Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926 collectio...)
1918(Philippa Strum, our foremost authority on Louis Brandeis,...)
1995(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
1911(A collection of thirty-two of Brandeis' addresses and sta...)
1942(Widely regarded as a leading progressive reformer as well...)
2002(The letters in this volume record an important transition...)
(These letters represent the closest Brandeis ever came to...)
1975(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
1912(Covers the later years of his life, closing with his death.)
1978(With the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912, Louis D. Bra...)
1973(Illustrated with 10 unique illustrations. While Louis D. ...)
1914(This book was first published in 1914. The author Louis D...)
1914In the earlier part of his life, he had no Jewish affiliation. He found his identification with Judaism in its emphasis on justice. This accorded with the Reform Judaism of his day, with its exclusive concentration on ethical values and its belief in a universalistic. Jewish mission. His first association with the Jewish masses came in 1910 when he arbitrated the garment workers’ strike in New York and was impressed by the Jewish working classes and their moral standards.
Shortly before World War I, he was attracted to Zionism and in 1914 became chairman of the Provisional Committee for General Zionist Affairs in the United States, which meant the leadership of the United States Zionism. He rejected accusations of dual loyalty and advocated what came to be known as cultural pluralism.
In 1914 Brandéis became the leader of the American Zionist movement, and he would remain active in this cause for the rest of his life. Brandeis supported the idea of a Palestinian home for his people, in part as a kind of laboratory in which his views about the value of participatory democracy might be given a concrete setting. The perfect state, he believed, should be small, democratic, and agrarian; and a Palestinian Jewish state offered the possibility of realizing this ideal. In Zionism, Brandeis’s political faith in democracy found expression. Democracy, one person declared of Brandeis - who was not a practicing Jew - was for him “not a political program. It is a religion.”
Although 454 of the 528 opinions Justice Brandeis wrote were for the Court’s majority, he often found himself dissenting in important cases, and many of his dissents would later become law. For example, he soon found himself at odds with conservatives on the Court who cast a suspicious constitutional eye on a variety of federal and state laws regulating economic matters. These conservatives, who often commanded a majority' on the Court, viewed such laws as unwarranted intrusions upon sacrosanct individual contract or property' rights. Brandeis, however, thought that the federal and state governments generally had to be free to experiment with new legal solutions for the problems created by 20th-century industrialism. He preferred, in tire main, to see such experimentation come from the state level, since he distrusted the accumulation of excessive power by the federal government as much as he distrusted its accumulation by corporations. Nevertheless, he generally practiced judicial restraint in reviewing economic regulations, including those passed by the federal government.
Quotations:
"The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people."
"Order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment; it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; fear breeds repression; repression breeds hate; hate menaces stable government."
"My sympathies are with those Jews who are working for a revival of a Jewish state in Palestine. My sympathy with the Zionist movement rests primarily upon the noble idealism which underlies it and the conviction that a great people, stirred by enthusiasm for such an ideal, must bear an important part in the betterment of the world."
"Every American Jew who aids in advancing the Jewish settlement in Palestine, though he feels that neither he nor his descendants will ever live there, will be a better man and a better American for doing so."
Brandeis' parents raised their children to be "high-minded idealists" rather than depending solely on religion for their purpose and inspiration. Brandeis often adopted a didactic approach and was regarded as a great teacher. To some, he was even of a prophetic nature and Roosevelt called him Isaiah.
Quotes from others about the person
Woodrow Wilson: “vehicle of the nation’s life.”
In 1890, Brandeis became engaged to Alice Goldmark, of New York. He was then 34 years of age and had previously found little time for courtship. Alice was the daughter of Joseph Goldmark, a physician, the brother of the composer Karl Goldmark, who had emigrated to America from Austria-Hungary after the collapse of the Revolution of 1848. They were married on March 23, 1891, at the home of her parents in New York City in a civil ceremony. The newlywed couple moved into a modest home in Boston's Beacon Hill district and had two daughters, Susan, born in 1893, and Elizabeth, born in 1896.