Authors & Artists

Louis Brandeis’s story is a Jewish mother’s dream come true. He grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and was accepted to Harvard Law School without a college degree, becoming one of the school’s most outstanding students. He became a successful private-practice lawyer while doing pro bono work to fight monopolies and protect the underdog. He then served as legal counsel to President Woodrow Wilson, who nominated him for the Supreme Court—the first Jew ever nominated. After being approved despite anti-Jewish sentiment, he served 22 years on the Court as a staunch defender of civil liberties. He married a Jewish woman, actively supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and had a university named after him.

Brandeis lived at a juncture in US history when wealth generated by 19^th-century industrial growth became a tool of excessive social and political power. In 1914 he wrote a treatise called Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It. “We can have democracy in this country,” he said, “or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

His most outstanding legal works include a counsel’s brief he wrote that defended minimum-wage, maximum-hour legislation for women laborers in Oregon; a Supreme Court opinion advocating the right of privacy in the face of the “dirty business” of wiretapping (Olmstead v. United States); and a Supreme Court opinion defending free speech against an overly broad application of “clear and present danger” (Whitney v. California).