Louis Brandeis

Family roots '' to commemorate his 80th birthday, November 15, 1936 Louis David Brandeis was born on November 13, 1856, in Louisville, Kentucky. He was the youngest of four children, and raised in a secular Jewish household. His parents, Adolph Brandeis and Frederika Dembitz immigrated to the United States from their childhood homes in Prague in Bohemia, Austrian Empire (now the Czech Republic). They emigrated as part of their extended families for both economic and political reasons. His extended family included Dante scholar Irma Brandeis, whose father was Brandeis' second cousin. The Revolutions of 1848 had produced a series of political upheavals and the families, though politically liberal and sympathetic to the rebels, were shocked by the antisemitic riots that erupted in Prague while the rebels controlled it. In addition, the Habsburg Empire had imposed business taxes on Jews. Family elders sent Adolph Brandeis to America to observe and prepare for his family's possible emigration. He spent a few months in the Midwest and was impressed by the nation's institutions and by the tolerance among the people he met. He wrote home to his wife, "America's progress is the triumph of the rights of man." Family life The Brandeis family were considered a "cultured family", trying not to discuss business or money during dinner, preferring subjects related to history, politics, and culture, or their daily lives. Having been raised partly on German culture, Louis read and appreciated the writings of Goethe and Schiller, and his favorite composers were Beethoven and Schumann. Louis grew up in "a family enamored with books, music, and politics, perhaps best typified by his revered uncle, Lewis Dembitz, a refined, educated man who served as a delegate to the Republican convention in 1860 that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president." Anticipating an economic downturn, Adolph Brandeis relocated the family to Europe in 1872. After a period spent traveling, Louis spent two years studying at the in Dresden, Germany, where he excelled. He later credited his capacity for critical thinking and his desire to study law in the United States to his time there. His eyesight began failing as a result of the large volume of required reading and the poor visibility under gaslights. The school doctors suggested he give up school entirely. He found another alternative: paying fellow law students to read the textbooks aloud, while he tried to memorize the legal principles. Despite the difficulties, his academic work and memorization talents were impressive. He graduated in 1877 as valedictorian and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Brandeis achieved the highest grade point average in the history of the school, a record that stood for eight decades. Brandeis said of that period: "Those years were among the happiest of my life. I worked! For me, the world's center was Cambridge." ==Early career in law==

After graduation, he stayed on at Harvard for another year, where he continued to study law on his own while also earning a small income by tutoring other law students. In 1878, he was admitted to the Missouri bar and accepted a job with a law firm in St. Louis, where he filed his first brief and published his first law review article. and won. Soon after, Chief Justice Melville Fuller recommended him to a friend as the best attorney he knew of in the Eastern U.S. Before taking on business clients, he insisted they agree to two major conditions: that he would only deal with the person in charge, never intermediaries, and he could be allowed to advise on any relevant aspects of the firm's affairs. He preferred being an adviser and counselor, rather than simply a strategist in lawsuits, which would allow him to advise his clients on how to avoid problems, such as lawsuits, strikes, or other crises. Between 1888 and 1890, Brandeis and his law partner, Samuel Warren, wrote three scholarly articles published in the Harvard Law Review. The third, "The Right to Privacy," was the most important, with legal scholar Roscoe Pound saying it accomplished "nothing less than adding a chapter to our law." Brandeis and Warren discussed "snapshot photography," a recent innovation in journalism, that allowed newspapers to publish photographs and statements of individuals without obtaining their consent. They argued that private individuals were being continually injured and that the practice weakened the "moral standards of society as a whole." They wrote: State courts and legislatures quickly drew on Brandeis and Warren's work. In 1905 the Georgia Supreme Court recognized a right to privacy in a case involving a photograph of the plaintiff published without his consent in an advertisement with a misattributed quotation. By 1909, California, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Utah had passed statutes establishing the right. In 1939 the American Law Institute's Restatement of Torts also recognized a right to privacy at common law. Years later, after becoming a justice of the Supreme Court, Brandeis discussed the right to privacy in his famous dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States. ==Personal life and marriage==

In 1890, Brandeis became engaged to his second cousin 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 who had immigrated 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 Brandeis Gilbert, born in 1893, and Elizabeth Brandeis Rauschenbush, born in 1896. Alice supported her husband's resolve to devote most of his time to public causes. The Brandeis family "lived well but without extravagance." With the continuing success of his law practice, they later purchased a vacation house in Dedham, where they would spend many of their weekends and summer vacations. Unexpectedly, his wife's health soon became frail, and so in addition to his professional duties, he found it necessary to manage the family's domestic affairs. ==Progressivism==

Brandeis became a leader of the Progressive movement, and he used the law as the instrument for social change. From 1897 to 1916, he was heavily involved with multiple reform crusades. He fought in Boston to secure honest traction franchises and, in 1907 launched a six-year fight to prevent the banker J. P. Morgan, who acquired the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, from monopolizing New England's railroads. After an exposé of insurance fraud in 1906, he devised the Massachusetts plan to protect small wage-earners through savings bank life insurance. He supported the conservation movement; in 1910, he emerged as the chief figure in the Pinchot–Ballinger investigation, saying: "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ==Public advocate==

In 1889, Brandeis entered a new phase in his legal career when his partner, Samuel Warren, withdrew from their partnership to take over his recently deceased father's paper company. Brandeis then took on cases with the help of colleagues, two of whom became partners in 1897 in his new firm: Brandeis, Dunbar, and Nutter. Part of his reasoning and philosophy for acting as a public advocate was later explained in his 1911 book, The Opportunity in the Law: In one of his first such cases, in 1894, he represented Alice N. Lincoln, a Boston philanthropist and noted crusader for the poor. He appeared at public hearings to promote investigations into conditions in the public poorhouses. Lincoln, who had visited the poorhouses for years, saw inmates dwelling in misery and the temporarily unemployed thrown in together with the mentally ill as well as hardened criminals. Against monopolies In the 1890s, Brandeis began to question his views on American industrialism. He became aware of the growing number of giant companies which were capable of dominating whole industries. He began to lose faith that the economic system was able to regulate them for the public's welfare. As a result, he denounced "cut-throat competition" and worried about monopolies. He also became concerned about the plight of workers and was more sympathetic to the labor movement. His earlier legal battles had convinced him that concentrated economic power could have a negative effect on a free society. Against big corporations Brandeis was becoming increasingly conscious of and hostile to powerful corporations and the trend toward bigness in American industry and finance. He argued that great size conflicted with efficiency and added a new dimension to the Efficiency Movement of the Progressive Era. As early as 1895, he had pointed out the harm that giant corporations could do to competitors, customers, and their own workers. The growth of industrialization was creating mammoth companies, which he felt threatened the well-being of millions of Americans. Although the Sherman Antitrust Act was enacted in 1890, it was not until the 20th century that there was any major effort to apply it. By 1910, Brandeis noticed that even America's leaders, including President Theodore Roosevelt, were beginning to question the value of antitrust policies. Some business experts felt that nothing could prevent the concentration of industry and so big business was here to stay. As a result, leaders like Roosevelt began to "regulate" but not to limit the growth and operation of corporate monopolies, but Brandeis wanted the trend to bigness slowed or even reversed. He was convinced that monopolies and trusts were "neither inevitable nor desirable." In support of Brandeis's position were the presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette Sr. Brandeis also denied that large trusts were more efficient than the smaller firms driven out of business. He argued the opposite was often true: that monopolistic enterprises became "less innovative" because, he wrote, their "secure positions freed them from the necessity which has always been the mother of invention." He explained that an executive could not ever learn all the details of running a huge and unwieldy company. "There is a limit to what one man can do well," he wrote. Brandeis was aware of the economies of scale and the initially lower prices offered by growing companies, but he noted that once a large company drove out its competition, "the quality of its products tended to decline while the prices charged for them tended to go up." Those companies would become "clumsy dinosaurs, which, if they ever had to face real competition, would collapse of their own weight." He said in an address to the Economic Club of New York in 1912: Against mass consumerism Among Brandeis's key themes was the conflict he saw between 19th-century values, with its culture of the small producer, and an emerging 20th-century age of big business and consumerist mass society. Brandeis was hostile to the new consumerism. Though himself a millionaire, Brandeis disliked wealthy persons who engaged in conspicuous consumption or were ostentatious. He did little shopping himself, and unlike his wealthy friends who owned yachts, he was satisfied with his canoe. He hated advertising which he said "manipulated" average buyers. He realized that newspapers and magazines were dependent on advertising for their revenues, which caused them to be "less free" than they should be. He said that national advertisers also undermined the traditional relationship between consumers and local businesses. He urged journalists to "teach the public to look with suspicion upon every advertised article" so that they would not suffer from marketing manipulation by giant corporations. ==Becoming "the people's lawyer"==

Brandeis was often referred to as "the people's lawyer." His foes were the most powerful he had ever encountered, including the region's most affluent families, Boston's legal establishment, and the large State Street bankers. The New Haven had been under the control of J. P. Morgan, the "most powerful of all American bankers and probably the most dominating figure in all of American business." In June 1907, Brandeis was asked by Boston and Maine stockholders to present their cause to the public, a case that he again took on by insisting on serving without payment, "leaving him free to act as he thought best." After months of extensive research, Brandeis published a 70-page booklet in which he argued that New Haven's acquisitions were putting its financial condition in jeopardy, and he predicted that within a few years, it would be forced to cut its dividends or to become insolvent. He spoke publicly to Boston's citizens warning them that the New Haven "sought to monopolize the transportation of New England." He soon found himself under attack by not only the New Haven but also by many newspapers, magazines, chambers of commerce, Boston bankers, and college professors. In 1934, Brandeis had another legal confrontation with Morgan, this one relating to securities regulation bills. J. P. Morgan's resident economist, Russell Leffingwell, felt it necessary to remind their banker, Tom Lamont, about the person with whom they would be dealing: Banking historian Ron Chernow wrote, "For the House of Morgan, Louis Brandeis was more than just a critic, he was an adversary of almost mythical proportion." Upholding workplace laws with the "Brandeis Brief" In 1908, he chose to represent the state of Oregon in the case of Muller v. Oregon before the US Supreme Court. At issue was whether it was constitutional for a state law to limit the hours worked by female workers. Until then, it had been considered an "unreasonable infringement of freedom of contract" between employers and their employees for a state to set any wages or hours legislation. Brandeis, however, discovered that earlier Supreme Court cases limited the rights of contract when the contract had "a real or substantial relation to public health or welfare." He, therefore, decided that the best way to present the case would be to demonstrate through an abundance of workplace facts, "a clear connection between the health and morals of female workers" and the hours that they were required to work. To accomplish that, he filed what has become known today as the "Brandeis Brief." It was much shorter than traditional briefs but included more than a hundred pages of documentation, including social worker reports, medical conclusions, factory inspector observations, and other expert testimonials, which together showed a preponderance of evidence displaying that "when women worked long hours, it was destructive to their health and morals." The strategy worked, and the Oregon law was upheld. Justice David Brewer directly credited Brandeis with demonstrating "a widespread belief that woman's physical structure and the functions that she performs ... justify special legislation." Thomas Mason wrote that with the Supreme Court affirming Oregon's minimum wage law, Brandeis "became the leading defender in the courts of protective labor legislation." As Justice Douglas wrote years later, "Brandeis usually sided with the workers; he put their cause in noble words and the merits of their claims with shattering clarity." John Vile added that this new "Brandeis Brief" was increasingly used, most notably in the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 that desegregated public schools. ==Supporting President Wilson==

Brandeis's positions on regulating large corporations and monopolies carried over into the presidential campaign of 1912. Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson made it a central issue, part of the larger debate over the future of the economic system and the role of the national government. While the Progressive Party candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, felt that trusts were inevitable and should be regulated, Wilson and his party aimed to "destroy the trusts" by ending special privileges, such as protective tariffs and unfair business practices that made them possible. Although originally a La Follette Republican, Brandeis switched to the Democrats and urged his friends and associates to join him. In 1913, Brandeis wrote a series of articles for ''Harper's Weekly'' that suggested ways of curbing the power of large banks and money trusts. In one of those, "What Publicity Can Do", he authored the quote regarding governmental transparency for which he is best remembered, over a century later: "Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." And in 1914 he published a book entitled ''Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It.'' He also urged the Wilson administration to develop proposals for new antitrust legislation to give the Department of Justice the power to enforce antitrust laws, with Brandeis becoming one of the architects of the Federal Trade Commission. Brandeis also served as Wilson's chief economic adviser from 1912 until 1916. "Above all else," writes McCraw, "Brandeis exemplified the anti-bigness ethic without which there would have been no Sherman Act, no antitrust movement, and no Federal Trade Commission." ==Nomination and confirmation to the Supreme Court==

depicting a "Chorus of Grief Stricken Conservatives" as the Brandeis appointment dismays "kept" journalism, privilege, Wall Street, monopoly, and stand-pattism in 1916 Puck cartoon|thumb|250px|upright On January 28, 1916, Wilson nominated Brandeis as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, to a seat vacated by Joseph R. Lamar. His nomination was bitterly contested and denounced by conservative Republicans, including former President William Howard Taft, whose credibility was damaged by Brandeis in early court battles in which he called Taft a "muckraker". What Brandeis's opponents most objected to was his "radicalism." The Wall Street Journal wrote of Brandeis, "In all the anti-corporation agitation of the past, one name stands out... where others were radical, he was rabid." Brandeis's successor, William O. Douglas, many years later, wrote that the nomination of Brandeis "frightened the Establishment" because he was "a militant crusader for social justice." Senator Henry Cabot Lodge privately complained, "If it were not that Brandeis is a Jew, and a German Jew, he would never have been appointed". Those in favor of seeing him join the court were just as numerous and influential. Brandeis had many friends who admired his legal acumen in fighting for progressive causes. They mounted a national publicity campaign that marginalized anti-semitic slurs in the legal profession. Supporters included attorneys, social workers, and reformers with whom he had worked on cases, and they testified eagerly on his behalf. Harvard law professor Roscoe Pound told the committee that "Brandeis was one of the great lawyers" and predicted that he would one day rank "with the best who have sat upon the bench of the Supreme Court." Other lawyers who supported him pointed out to the committee that he "had angered some of his clients by his conscientious striving to be fair to both sides in a case." He was sworn into office on June 5, 1916. ==Supreme Court tenure==

Brandeis served on the U.S. Supreme Court for 23 years. On the court, Brandeis continued to be a strong voice for progressivism. He is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential justices in the history of the United States Supreme Court, often being ranked among the very "greatest" justices in the court's history. While on the Court, Brandeis kept politically active behind the scenes, as was then acceptable. He was an advisor to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal through intermediaries. Many of his disciples held influential jobs, especially in the Justice Department. Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter (who served together very briefly on the Court) often collaborated on political issues. In October 1918, he helped Thomas Garrigue Masaryk to create the "Washington Declaration" for the founding of a new independent Czechoslovakia. Leading Cases Gilbert v. Minnesota (1920) – Freedom of speech There was a strong conservative streak in the U.S. beginning with World War I and into the 1920s, and this conservatism was reflected in decisions of the Supreme Court. Both Brandeis and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. often dissented and became known for consistently challenging the majority's view. (However, both men approved the Selective Draft Law Cases which upheld the constitutionality of conscription, the restrictive Schenck v. United States decision in 1919 and the pro-sterilization Buck v. Bell decision in 1927). These dissents were most noteworthy in cases dealing with the free speech rights of defendants who had expressed opposition to the military draft. Justice Holmes developed the concept of "clear and present danger" as the test any restriction on speech had to meet. Both Holmes and Brandeis used this doctrine in other cases. Vile points out that Brandeis was "spurred by his appreciation for democracy, education, and the value of free speech and continued to argue vigorously for ... free speech even in wartime because of its educational value and the importance to democracy." One such case was Gilbert v. Minnesota (1920) which dealt with a state law prohibiting interference with the military's enlistment efforts. In his dissenting opinion, Brandeis wrote that the statute affected the "rights, privileges, and immunities of one who is a citizen of the United States; and it deprives him of an important part of his liberty. ... [T]he statute invades the privacy and freedom of the home. Father and mother may not follow the promptings of religious belief, of conscience or of conviction, and teach son or daughter the doctrine of pacifism. If they do, any police officer may summarily arrest them." Legal author Ken Gormley says Brandeis was "attempting to introduce a notion of privacy which was connected in some fashion to the Constitution ... and which worked in tandem with the First Amendment to assure a freedom of speech within the four brick walls of the citizen's residence." In 1969, in Stanley v. Georgia, Justice Marshall succeeded in linking the right of privacy with freedom of speech and making it part of the constitutional structure, quoting from Brandeis's Olmstead dissent and his Whitney concurrence, and adding his own conclusions from the case at hand, which dealt with the issue of viewing pornography at home: Underwood Typewriter Co. v. Chamberlain (1920) – States' right to tax income The first modern state income tax was adopted by Wisconsin in 1911 (in effect in 1912). It wasn't long before the Court had a chance to consider the tax's Constitutionality. Justice Brandeis wrote the unanimous opinion in Underwood Typewriter Co. v. Chamberlain (254 U.S. 113 (1920)). In Underwood, Justice Brandeis wrote that the states could tax the income of corporations doing a multistate business as long as the state taxed only the state's apportioned share of the corporation's income. He also first articulated what ultimately came to be known as the unitary business principle, when he wrote for the Court "The profits of the corporation were largely earned by a series of transactions beginning with manufacture in Connecticut and ending with sale in other states. In this, it was typical of a large part of the manufacturing business conducted in the state.... [The legislature] therefore adopted a method of apportionment which, for all that appears in this record, reached, and was meant to reach, only the profits earned within the state." (Underwood, 254 U.S. at 120–121.) It may be worth noting that although the Underwood Typewriter Company no longer is in existence, some of their typewriters may be found at the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation in Waltham, Massachusetts—less than two miles from Brandeis University. Whitney v. California (1927) – Freedom of speech The case of Whitney v. California is notable partly because of the concurring opinion of both Justices Brandeis and Holmes. The case dealt with the prosecution of a woman for aiding the Communist Labor Party, an organization that was promoting the violent overthrow of the government. In their opinion and test to uphold the conviction, they expanded the definition of "clear and present danger" to include the condition that the "evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion." According to legal historian Anthony Lewis, scholars have lauded Brandeis's opinion "as perhaps the greatest defense of freedom of speech ever written by a member of the high court." In their concurring opinion, they wrote: Olmstead v. United States (1928) – Right of privacy In his widely cited dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. United States (1928), Brandeis relied on thoughts he developed in his 1890 Harvard Law Review article "The Right to Privacy." But in his dissent, he now changed the focus whereby he urged making personal privacy matters more relevant to constitutional law, going so far as saying "the government [was] identified ... as a potential privacy invader." At issue in Olmstead was the use of wiretap technology to gather evidence. Referring to this "dirty business," he then tried to combine the notions of civil privacy and the "right to be let alone" with the right offered by the Fourth Amendment which disallowed unreasonable search and seizure. Brandeis wrote in his lengthy dissent: In succeeding years his right of privacy concepts gained powerful disciples who relied on his dissenting opinion: Justice Frank Murphy, in 1942, used his Harvard Law Review article in writing an opinion for the Court; a few years later, Justice Felix Frankfurter referred to the Fourth Amendment as the "protection of the right to be let alone," as in the 1947 case of United States v. Harris, where his opinion wove together the speeches of James Otis, James Madison, John Adams, and Brandeis's Olmstead opinion, proclaiming the right of privacy as "second to none in the Bill of Rights" Again, five years later, Justice William O. Douglas openly declared that he had been wrong about his earlier tolerance of wiretapping and wrote, "I now more fully appreciate the vice of the practices spawned by Olmstead ... I now feel that I was wrong ... Mr. Justice Brandeis in his dissent in Olmstead espoused the cause of privacy – the right to be let alone. What he wrote is an historic statement of that point of view. I cannot improve on it." And in 1963, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. joined with these earlier opinions taking the position that "the Brandeis point of view" was well within the longstanding tradition of American law. Further, in the landmark case of Roe v. Wade, one of the most controversial and politically significant cases in U.S. Supreme Court history, the Court wrote, "This right of privacy ... is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." Packer Corporation v. Utah (1932) – Captive audience and free speech In Packer Corporation v. Utah (1932), Brandeis was to advance an exception to the right of free speech. In this case, a unanimous Court, led by Brandeis, found a clear distinction between advertising placed in newspapers and magazines with those placed on public billboards. The case was a notable exception and dealt with a conflict between widespread First Amendment rights with the public's right of privacy and advanced a theory of the "captive audience." Brandeis delivered the opinion of the Court to advance privacy interests: Burnet v. Coronado Oil & Gas Co. (1932) – Stare decisis Brandeis forever changed the way people think about stare decisis, one of the most distinctive principles of the common law legal system. In his widely cited dissenting opinion in Burnet v. Coronado Oil & Gas Co. (1932), Brandeis "catalogued the Court's actual overruling practices in such a powerful manner that his attendant stare decisis analysis immediately assumed canonical authority." Brandeis wrote: The rule of stare decisis descended from Brandeis's formulation would later split into strong and weak forms as a result of the disagreement between Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall in Payne v. Tennessee (1991). New Deal cases Along with Benjamin Cardozo and Harlan F. Stone, Brandeis was considered to be in the liberal wing of the court—the so-called Three Musketeers who stood against the conservative Four Horsemen. Louisville v. Radford (1935) – limiting presidential discretion According to John Vile, in the final years of his career, like the rest of the Court, he "initially combated the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which went against everything Brandeis had ever preached in opposition to the concepts of 'bigness' and 'centralization' in the federal government and the need to return to the states." Speaking to aides of Roosevelt, Justice Louis Brandeis remarked that, "This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we're not going to let this government centralize everything." Brandeis also opposed Roosevelt's court-packing scheme of 1937, which proposed to add one additional justice to the Supreme Court for every sitting member who had reached the age of seventy without retiring. "This was," felt Brandeis and others on the Court, a "thinly veiled attempt to change the decisions of the Court by adding new members who were supporters of the New Deal," leading historian Nelson Dawson to conclude that "Brandeis ... was not alone in thinking that Roosevelt's scheme threatened the integrity of the institution." Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins (1938) – Federal versus state laws His last important judicial opinion was also one of the most significant of his career, according to Klebanow and Jonas. In Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins (1938), the Supreme Court addressed the issue of whether federal judges apply state law or federal common law where the parties to a lawsuit are from different states. Writing for the Court, Brandeis overruled the ninety-six-year-old doctrine of Swift v. Tyson (1842), and held that there was no such thing as a "federal general common law" in cases involving diversity jurisdiction. This concept became known as the Erie Doctrine. Applying the Erie Doctrine, federal courts now must conduct a choice of law analysis, which generally requires that the courts apply the law of the state where the injury or transaction occurred. "This ruling," concluded Klebanow and Jonas, "fits in well with Brandeis's goals of strengthening the states and reversing the long-term trend toward centralization and bigness." Other cases In 1919, Brandeis sided with the unanimous majority on the court in ruling that Eugene V. Debs' protests against US involvement in World War I violated the Espionage Act of 1917 in Debs v. United States because Debs had shown the "intention and effect of obstructing the draft and recruitment for the war." Later that year in Abrams v. United States he dissented with the majority opinion to express that political dissent was protected by the First Amendment. ==Zionism==

Relatively late in life the secular Brandeis also became a prominent figure in the Zionist movement. He became active in the Federation of American Zionists in 1912, as a result of a conversation with Jacob de Haas, according to some. His involvement provided the nascent American Zionist movement one of the most distinguished men in American life and a friend of the next president. Over the next several years he devoted a great deal of his time, energy, and money to championing the cause. With the outbreak of World War I in Europe, the divided allegiance of its membership rendered the World Zionist Organization impotent. American Jews then assumed a larger responsibility independent of Zionists in Europe. The Provisional Executive Committee for Zionist Affairs was established in New York for this purpose on August 20, 1914, and Brandeis was elected president of the organization. He also explained his belief that Zionism and patriotism were compatible concepts and should not lead to charges of "dual loyalty" which worried the rabbis and the dominant American Jewish Committee: Early in the war, Jewish leaders determined that they needed to elect a special representative body to attend the peace conference as spokesman for the religious, national and political rights of Jews in certain European countries, especially to guarantee that Jewish minorities were included wherever minority rights were recognized. Under the leadership of Brandeis, Stephen Wise and Julian Mack, the Jewish Congress Organization Committee was established in March 1915. The subsequent vehement debate about the idea of a "congress" stirred the feelings of American Jews and acquainted them with the Jewish problem. but further efforts to organize awaited the end of the war. Brandeis also brought his influence to bear on the Wilson administration in the negotiations leading up to the Balfour Declaration and the Paris Peace Conference. In July 1919 he visited Palestine. Later in 1919 Brandeis broke with Chaim Weizmann, the leader of European Zionism. In 1921 Weizmann's candidates, headed by Louis Lipsky, defeated Brandeis's for political control of the Zionist Organization of America. Brandeis resigned from the ZOA, along with his closest associates Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Judge Julian W. Mack and Felix Frankfurter. His ouster was devastating to the movement, and by 1929 there were no more than 18,000 members in the ZOA. Nonetheless, he remained active in philanthropy directed at Jews in Palestine. In the summer of 1930, these two factions and visions of Zionism would come to a compromise largely on Brandeis's terms, with a changed leadership structure for the ZOA. In the late 1930s he endorsed immigration to Palestine in an effort to help European Jews escape genocide when Britain denied entry to more Jews. == Death ==

Brandeis retired from the Supreme Court on February 13, 1939, and he died on October 5, 1941, aged 84. Brandeis himself made the arrangements that made the law school one of only thirteen Supreme Court repositories in the U.S. His professional papers are archived at the library there. ==Legacy==

'' cover, October 19, 1925 According to Constitutional Law historian Alfred H. Kelly: :Throughout his long public career, Louis D. Brandeis consistently pursued one major ideal: that of a liberal progressive society based on democracy and social justice. Brandeis early became convinced that the gigantic trusts which by 1900 had come to dominate large segments of American business not only were hopelessly inefficient in a narrow economic sense but also menaced the very existence of political democracy itself.... [H]e sought to ameliorate what he called the "curse of bigness" and to establish a new industrial democracy based on a partnership between business, organized labor, and the public.... He never challenged the fundamentals of capitalism itself; rather he looked back with nostalgic longing toward the vanished Jeffersonian notion of a self-regulated economic order characterized by competition among a great variety of small entrepreneurs.... In his last years on the Court, Brandeis became a fairly consistent judicial protagonist of the New Deal.... Before his retirement from the Court, Brandeis was rewarded by seeing the majority justices accept not only the major constitutional premises of the New Deal but also his own positions on First Amendment liberties, on labor legislation, and a judicial abuse of the due process clause. Thus Brandeis emerges finally as a lifelong champion of an open libertarian democratic society. Brandeis lived to see many of the ideas that he had championed become the law of the land. Wages and hours legislation was now accepted as constitutional, and the right of labor to organize was protected by law. His spirited, eloquent defense of free speech and the right of privacy have had a continuing, powerful influence upon the Supreme Court and, ultimately, upon the life of the entire nation. The Economist magazine has called him "A Robin Hood of the law," and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, his early law clerk, was "impressed by a man whose personal code called for... the zealous molding of the lives of the underprivileged so that paupers might achieve moral growth." Wayne McIntosh writes of him, "In our national juristic temple, some figures have been accorded near-Olympian reverence... a part of that legal pantheon is Louis D. Brandeis – all the more so, perhaps because Brandeis was far more than a great justice. He was also a social reformer, legal innovator, labor champion, and Zionist leader... And it was as a judge that his concepts of privacy and free speech ultimately, if posthumously, resulted in virtual legal sea changes that continue to resonate even today." Former Justice William O. Douglas wrote, "he helped America grow to greatness by the dedications of which he made his life." and Adjunct Professor of state taxation at both Boston College Law School and Boston University School of Law, writes in a Letter to the Editor in State Tax Notes that Justice Brandeis' contributions in the field of State Taxation are underappreciated. Justice Brandeis laid the foundation for the modern approach to state taxation of income in his opinion in the Underwood Typewriter case. That foundation, in turn, has had important application in the global taxation of income of multinationals. The World War II Liberty Ship was named in his honor. The U.S. Postal Service in September 2009 honored Brandeis by featuring his image on a new set of commemorative stamps along with U.S. Supreme Court associate justices Joseph Story, Felix Frankfurter and William J. Brennan Jr. In the Postal Service announcement about the stamp, he was credited with being "the associate justice most responsible for helping the Supreme Court shape the tools it needed to interpret the Constitution in light of the sociological and economic conditions of the 20th century." The Postal Service honored him with a stamp image in part because, their announcement states, he was "a progressive and champion of reform, [and] Brandeis devoted his life to social justice. He defended the right of every citizen to speak freely, and his groundbreaking conception of the right to privacy continues to impact legal thought today." Brandeis was a founding member of the Massachusetts Bar Association. Brandeis is a character in the play The Magnificent Yankee, about Oliver Wendell Holmes. In the 1950 movie he is played by Eduard Franz. ==Namesake institutions==

• Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts. Several awards given at the school are named in his honor. A collection of his personal papers is available at the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department at Brandeis University. • The University of Louisville's Louis D. Brandeis School of Law. The school's principal law review publication was named the Brandeis Law Journal until it was renamed in 2007. The law school's Louis D. Brandeis Society awards the Brandeis Medal. at the University of Louisville opened in 1846 and was named for Justice Brandeis in 1997. • The Brandeis University Law Journal, one of the country's few undergraduate law publications, launched in 2009. • The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law, a civil rights organization established in Washington, D.C. to combat antisemitism in higher education. • Kibbutz Ein Hashofet (Hebrew: ) in Israel, founded 1937. "Ein Hashofet" means "Spring of the Judge", a name chosen to honor Brandeis's Zionism. • Kfar Brandeis (lit: Brandeis village) is a suburb of the Israeli city of Hadera. • One of the buildings of Hillman Housing Corporation, a housing cooperative founded by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. • The Brandeis School, a private Jewish day-school in Lawrence, New York. • The Brandeis School of San Francisco, a K–8 independent coeducational Jewish day school in San Francisco, California (formerly one of two campuses of Brandeis Hillel Day School). • Brandeis Marin, an independent Jewish school in San Rafael, California (formerly one of two campuses of Brandeis Hillel Day School). • The Brandeis-Bardin Institute, in Simi Valley, near Los Angeles, a Jewish educational outreach resource. • The New York City Public Schools' Louis D. Brandeis High School, named for the justice and dissolved in 2012, though the building, which houses several smaller educational units, is now called the Brandeis High School Campus. • Louis D. Brandeis High School, in San Antonio, Texas, where the Northside Independent School District names all of its comprehensive high schools for Supreme Court Justices • Louis D. Brandeis Law Society, in Philadelphia, a "Jewish law society ... dedicated to advancing and enriching the personal and professional interests of [its] members of the Bench and Bar." • Louis D. Brandeis AZA #932, a B'nai B'rith Youth Organization Chapter in Dallas. • Brandeis AZA #1519, a B'nai B'rith Youth Organization Chapter in Rockville, Maryland. • Brandeis AZA #1999, a B'nai B'rith Youth Organization Chapter in Minneapolis, Minnesota • Hadassah-Brandeis Apprentice School of Printing in Jerusalem, Israel ==Selected judicial opinions==

• Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority (1936) (concurring) • Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins (1938) (majority) • • New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (1932) (dissenting) • Olmstead v. United States (1928) (dissenting) • • Sugarman v. United States (1919) (majority) • • • The Collected Supreme Court Opinions of Louis D. Brandeis • Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon (1922) (dissenting) • Loughran v. Loughran (1934) (majority) ==Selected publications==

Books • • Articles • • • ==See also==