Louis Brandeis

His parents left Prague after the antisemitic riots of 1848 and settled in Louisville because it was a prosperous river port, where the family's abolitionist views annoyed the neighbors. He finished Louisville Male High School at 14 with the highest honors, then spent two years at the Annenschule in Dresden when his father moved everyone back to Europe. He entered Harvard Law at 18 with no money from home. His eyesight failed under the gaslight, doctors told him to quit, and he paid other students to read the textbooks aloud while he memorized them. He graduated in 1877 as valedictorian with the highest grade average in the school's history, a record that held for eight decades.

He opened a Boston firm with Samuel Warren in 1879 and made enough money to stop charging for work he cared about. With Warren he wrote The Right to Privacy for the Harvard Law Review in December 1890. Refusing fees so he could argue the issue and not just the case, he forced savings bank life insurance through the Massachusetts legislature in 1907 and spent nine years dismantling J. P. Morgan's attempt to swallow New England's railroads. In Muller v. Oregon in 1908 he won with a brief that was mostly not law — a hundred pages of medical reports and factory inspections. He drafted pieces of the Federal Reserve Act, helped design the Federal Trade Commission, and in January 1916 was nominated to the Court, then confirmed 47 to 22 after the first public confirmation hearing in Senate history.

In 23 years on the Court he never wrote an opinion in a case about race. He voted with the majority in the civil rights cases that reached him, including the ones that left segregation standing. The justice whose Whitney concurrence is read as the finest defense of free speech any American judge has written also joined the Court in Schenck, joined the unanimous ruling that sent Eugene Debs to prison under the Espionage Act, and joined the majority in Buck v. Bell, which cleared Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck. He kept working politics from the bench, advising Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal through intermediaries while sitting in judgment on its statutes — and he voted to strike down the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Frazier-Lemke farm mortgage law, then opposed Roosevelt's plan to enlarge the Court.

He stepped down on February 13, 1939, and died in Washington on October 5, 1941, at 84. He and his wife are interred beneath the portico of the University of Louisville law school, which he had arranged to make one of the country's few Supreme Court paper repositories and which took his name in 1997. Brandeis University opened in Waltham. A kibbutz in Israel is called Ein Hashofet, the Spring of the Judge. His Olmstead dissent lost in 1928 and won in 1967, when Katz v. United States overturned the decision he had written against. The antitrust argument he lost to Theodore Roosevelt came back a century later under a name borrowed from him, the New Brandeis movement.

Louis Brandeis's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Right to Privacy article
  Harvard Law Review, with Samuel Warren. The origin of the right to be let alone 1890
• Savings bank life insurance law
  A Massachusetts system he designed after a year studying how the industry treated low-wage policyholders 1907
• The Brandeis Brief in Muller v. Oregon case
  Short on precedent, long on evidence. The model later used against school segregation 1908
• Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It book
  Collected from his Harper's Weekly series on the money trust 1914
• Concurrence in Whitney v. California case
  Men feared witches and burnt women 1927
• Dissent in Olmstead v. United States case
  Wiretapping and the Fourth Amendment. Overturned the majority 39 years later 1928

• 1877 aged ~21 Graduates first in his Harvard Law class at 20 He had paid classmates to read to him after his eyesight gave out.
• 1879 aged ~23 Opens a Boston law firm with Samuel Warren It is still in practice, as Nutter McClennen and Fish.
• December 15, 1890 aged 34 Publishes The Right to Privacy in the Harvard Law Review Prompted by press photographers at Warren family events.
• March 23, 1891 aged 34 Marries his second cousin Alice Goldmark in New York
• June 1907 aged 50 Takes on J. P. Morgan and the New Haven Railroad without a fee He wrote to his brother that he had made more enemies than in all his previous fights together.
• 1908 aged ~52 Wins Muller v. Oregon with a brief built out of facts rather than precedent
• January 28, 1916 aged 59 Woodrow Wilson nominates him to the Supreme Court Taft, Elihu Root and past presidents of the American Bar Association called him unfit.
• June 1, 1916 aged 59 Confirmed 47 to 22 after four months and the first public confirmation hearing
• February 13, 1939 aged 82 Retires from the Court after 23 years William O. Douglas took his seat.

• Woodrow Wilson 1856–1924
  28th President who led the nation through World War I and championed the League of Nations. nominated by
• J. P. Morgan 1837–1913
  Banking titan who stabilized the economy during the Panic of 1907 and shaped modern finance. fought for nine years
• Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 1841–1935
  Justice whose pragmatic jurisprudence and free-speech opinions deeply influenced American law. dissented alongside
• William Howard Taft 1857–1930
  Only person to serve as both president and Chief Justice of the United States. opposed his confirmation
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. disagreed with on the trusts
• Felix Frankfurter 1882–1965
  Supreme Court justice and Harvard professor whose jurisprudence and government service shaped twentieth-century American law. ally and successor in the argument