[On
June 1, 1916, Louis Brandeis was confirmed to the Supreme Court, becoming
the first
Jewish American Justice. So this week I’ll highlight the American stories
of Brandeis and four other exemplary Jewish Americans, leading up to a special
weekend tribute to one of our best Jewish Studies scholars!]
On three social
and legal legacies of the “People’s
Lawyer.”
To start with a
bit of inside baseball info: I’m drafting this post the day after the news
story broke about a widespread and nefarious scam through which wealthy
parents fraudulently sought to get their kids into elite universities. That
story has produced various subsequent conversations, including many focused on
the problems with both the concept of “elite” education and those who generally
gain access to it. As a Harvard
alum myself, I fully agree with those critiques, but I’ll add this:
sometimes egalitarian greatness can still emerge from such frustratingly
elitist settings. And Louis Brandeis (1856-1941), who enrolled in
Harvard Law School at the strikingly young age of 18, seems to have been
just such a case: throughout his legal career Brandeis became known as the
“People’s Lawyer,” due not only to his commitment to progressive causes and
social justice, but also and especially to his frequent practice of not
receiving payment so as not to have any conflicts of interest in his pursuit of
those goals. Given that Brandeis began practicing law at the height (or depth)
of the Gilded Age, that profoundly egalitarian ethos was both all the more
striking and a vital alternative to some of the era’s dominant narratives
(including in
the realm of law).
Moreover,
Brandeis contributed significantly to one of the Progressive Era’s most direct
critiques of those Gilded Age narratives: the attacks on corporations and the hierarchical
and destructive economic and social systems they too often embodied and
extended. He did so through a number of sustained efforts across his career,
including vocal support (and legal buttressing) for the
antitrust movement of the late 19th and early 20th
century. But he summed this philosophy up in a series of rigorously researched and
passionately argued 1913 and 1914 Harper’s
Weekly articles that became his 1914 book Other
People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It. Besides its contemporary
importance (and its frustratingly continued salience to our own era of “too big
to fail” and the like), Brandeis’s book also helped push back against the period’s
widespread anti-Semitic slurs (also still far too common in our own moment)
that sought to link images of rapacious bankers with bigoted visions of Jews
controlling the world. Such slurs shouldn’t have to be responded to at all, of
course—but as recent events have illustrated, they can’t be ignored, and works
and voices like Brandeis’s help reveal them for the nonsensical ugliness that
they were and are.
Brandeis’s legal
philosophies, both before and during his multi-decade stint on the
Supreme Court, have likewise left important legacies that continue to echo
down into our 21st century society. On the high court that included
a series of important 1920s
cases on free speech (often, as in that case, decided in opposition to that
freedom, with Brandeis dissenting significantly) and a series
of 1930s ones that sought to balance the decade’s New Deal programs with
limits on federal power and presidential overreach. But long before his Supreme
Court tenure, Brandeis was one of the first legal thinkers to articulate the
vital concept of a
“right to privacy.” He did so first in a December
1890 Harvard Law Review article
(co-authored with his lifelong friend and legal
partner Samuel Warren), which he then followed up by working on numerous
cases that further developed, clarified, and solidified this pivotal 20th
century legal idea. Even if Brandeis had remained a Boston-area lawyer, this
article and concept would have been more than enough to secure his legal and
social legacies—but instead they represent just one highlight in the long and
illustrious career of the first Jewish American Supreme Court Justice.
Next journey
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Jewish Americans you’d highlight?
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