Brandeis, Louis Dembitz, 1856-1941, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1916-39), b. Louisville, Ky., grad. Harvard law school, 1877. As a successful Boston lawyer (1879-1916), Brandeis distinguished himself by investigating insurance practices and by establishing (1907) Massachusetts savings-bank insurance. After defending (1900-1907) the public interest in Boston utility cases, he served (1907-14) as counsel for the people in proceedings involving the constitutionality of wages and hours laws in Oregon, Illinois, Ohio, and California. In Muller v. Oregon (1908) he persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court that minimum-hours legislation for women was reasonable—and not unconstitutional—with a brief primarily consisting of statistical, sociological, economic, and physiological information. This "Brandeis brief," as it came to be called, revolutionized legal practice by ensuring that the law would not be viewed as rigid and unchanging, but would be responsive to new situations, new realities, and new facts as they arose.

Brandeis opposed (1907-13) the monopoly of transportation in New England and successfully argued (1910-14) before the Interstate Commerce Commission against railroad-rate increases. In 1910 as a counsel in the congressional investigation of Richard A. Ballinger, he exposed the anticonservationist views of President Taft's secretary of the interior. As an arbitrator (1910) of a strike of New York garment workers, who were mainly Jewish, Brandeis, a largely secular Jew, became acutely aware of Jewish problems and afterward became a leader of the Zionist movement. An enemy of industrial and financial monopoly, he formulated the economic doctrine of the New Freedom that Woodrow Wilson adopted in his 1912 presidential campaign.

In 1916, over the protests of vested interests whom Brandeis had alienated in his role as "people's attorney" and despite opposition voiced by anti-Semites and certain business interests, Wilson appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court. Long an advocate of social and economic reforms, he maintained a position of principled judicial liberalism on the bench. With Oliver Wendell Holmes, he often dissented from the majority. After Franklin Delano Roosevelt became (1933) president, Brandeis was one of the few justices who voted to uphold most of Roosevelt's New Deal legislation. He retired from the bench in 1939. Brandeis Univ. is named after him. He wrote Other People's Money (1914) and Business, a Profession (1914). For selections of his writings, see Alfred Lief, ed., The Social and Economic Views of Mr. Justice Brandeis (1930); O. K. Fraenkel, ed., The Curse of Bigness (1935); Solomon Goldman, ed., The Words of Justice Brandeis (1953).

(born Nov. 13, 1856, Louisville, Ky., U.S.—died Oct. 5, 1941, Washington, D.C.) U.S. jurist. The son of Bohemian Jewish immigrants, he attended schools in Kentucky and Germany before obtaining his law degree from Harvard (1877). As a lawyer in Boston (1877–1916), he was known as “the people's attorney” for his defense of the constitutionality of several state hours-and-wages laws, his devising of a savings-bank life-insurance plan for working people, and his efforts to strengthen the government's antitrust power. His work influenced passage in 1914 of the Clayton Anti-Trust Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act. He also developed what came to be called the “Brandeis brief,” in which economic and sociological data, historical material, and expert opinion are marshaled to support a legal argument. Appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States (1916), he was noted for his devotion to freedom of speech. Many of his minority opinions, in which he was often aligned with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., later were accepted by the court in the New Deal era. His appointment as the first Jewish justice was vigorously opposed by some business interests and anti-Semitic groups. He served until 1939. Brandeis University is named for him.

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The Louis D. Brandeis School of Law is the law school of the University of Louisville. Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis, who served on the Supreme Court of the United States, was the school's patron, and he bequeathed his papers to the school. The cremated remains of Justice Brandeis and his wife Alice Goldmark Brandeis rest under the front portico of the law school. The school is one of few Supreme Court repositories in the nation.

Jim Chen is the current Dean of the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville.

External links

• Louis D. Brandeis School of Law