Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People

by Philippa Strum

Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) played a role in almost every important social and economic movement during his long life: trade unionism, trust busting, progressivism, woman suffrage, scientific management, expansion of civil liberties, hours, wages, and unemployment legislation, Wilson's New Freedom, Roosevelt's New Deal. He invented savings bank life insurance and the preferential union shop, became known as the "People's Attorney," and altered American jurisprudence as a lawyer and Supreme Court judge. Brandeis led American Zionism from 1914 through 1921 and again from 1930 until his death. He earned over two million dollars practicing law between 1878 and 1916 and used his wealth to foster public causes. He was adviser to leaders from Robert La Follette to Frances Perkins, William McAdoo to Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman.

This lively account of Brandeis's life and legacy, based on ten years of research in sources not available to previous biographers, reveals much that is new and gives fuller context to personal and historical events. The most significant revelations have to do with his intellectual development. That Brandeis opposed political and economic "bigness" and excessive concentration of wealth is well known. What was not known prior to Strum's research is how far Brandeis carried his beliefs, becoming committed to the goals of worker participation—the sharing of profits and decision making by workers in "manageable"-sized firms. So it happened that the man who was sometimes dismissed as an outmoded horse-and-buggy liberal championed a cause too radical even for the New Deal braintrusters who were quick to follow his advice in other areas

Strum charts Brandeis's development as a kind of industrial-era Jeffersonian deeply influenced by the classical ideals of Periclean Athens. She shows that this was the source not only of his vision of a democracy based on a human-scaled polis, but also of his sudden emergence, in his late fifties, as the leading American Zionist: he had come to regard Palestine as the locus of a new Athens. And later, on the Supreme Court, this Athenian conception of human potential took justice Brandeis beyond even Justice Holmes in the determined use of judicial power to protect civil liberties and democracy in an industrialized society.

Genres: Biography, Law, History

536 pages, Hardcover

First published May 31, 1984

About the author

Philippa Strum is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She was the Former Director of the Division of United States Studies at Woodrow Wilson Center.

Reviews

[Larissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

brandeis was a self-financed activist lawyer who, while running a successful practice in boston, also got the peoples' job done. as a lawyer, he pioneered sociological jurisprudence, that is, the use of facts to supplement exclusively legal argument, marshaling pages and pages of research on, say, the strain of overwork on women to win a 10-hr day (!). he not only battled monopolistic life insurance companies, he suggested and actually helped implement an alternative way to allow working people to save (savings bank life insurance). all this was at the state level: he cherished the idea that states should experiment with legislation first, and when he was on the supreme court later, was a big proponent of judicial restraint. he was a key advisor to w wilson, helping craft major financial reform legislation like the federal reserve, and was app'td by him in 1916 to the supreme court, where he stayed through the twenties into the new deal, when he finally saw his and the progressives' ideas about labor and the social safety net (brandeis more or less invented unemployment insurance) become the law of the land. but he never stopped criticizing concentrated power: in government (shocking FDR by striking down the NRA, a program in which gov't and industrial leaders created regulatory codes) as well as in corporations. for brandeis most things came down to "the curse of bigness" / jeffersonian democracy (and, apparently, a big interest in athens, which, as a leader of american zionism, is what he thought palestine could and should be)---and he spent his life trying to reconcile this to the industrial age which was his own.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

To quote one of Brandeis's law clerks, speaking of Brandeis: "I have made his character a test of my own." The man has become my touchstone not only as a lawyer, activist, and American, but also as a human being. This book does an excellent job of illuminating Brandeis's complex beliefs on social and economic issues, many of which are still radical today. Brandeis was the true heir of Jeffersonian democratic ideals - believing that freedom for every individual must be the goal of civilization, and that individuals can never enjoy true political freedom unless they are first economically free.

Nonetheless, Strum's agenda is pretty clear here (the title alone should give you a hint), and she does not adequately confront and unpack the contradictions in Brandeis's thought and career - his affirmation of the separate but equal doctrine, his initial opposition to women's suffrage, his support for Prohibition, his praise of Jews over other Americans as well as Arabs, etc. To me, a full analysis of these contradictions would ultimately show not only Brandeis's human fallibility, but also his greatness.

This book was a great start for me in learning about Brandeis, but I think it is far from a definitive account of his life and career.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

My homeboy from Louisville!