An edition of Louis D. Brandeis (2009)

Louis D. Brandeis

a life

  • 0 Ratings
  • 0 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 0 Have read

My Reading Lists:

Create a new list

Check-In

×Close
Add an optional check-in date. Check-in dates are used to track yearly reading goals.
Today

  • 0 Ratings
  • 0 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 0 Have read

Buy this book

Last edited by ImportBot
October 22, 2021 | History
An edition of Louis D. Brandeis (2009)

Louis D. Brandeis

a life

  • 0 Ratings
  • 0 Want to read
  • 0 Currently reading
  • 0 Have read

The first full-scale biography in twenty-five years of one of the most important and distinguished justices to sit on the Supreme Court--a book that reveals Louis D. Brandeis the reformer, lawyer, and jurist, and Brandeis the man, in all of his complexity, passion, and wit. Louis Dembitz Brandeis had at least four "careers." As a lawyer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he pioneered how modern law is practiced. He, and others, developed the modern law firm, in which specialists manage different areas of the law. He was the author of the right to privacy; led the way in creating the role of the lawyer as counselor; and pioneered the idea of pro bono publico work by attorneys. As late as 1916, when Brandeis was nominated to the Supreme Court, the idea of pro bono service still struck many old-time attorneys as somewhat radical. Between 1895 and 1916, when Woodrow Wilson named Brandeis to the Supreme Court, he ranked as one of the nation's leading progressive reformers. Brandeis invented savings bank life insurance in Massachusetts (he considered it his most important contribution to the public weal) and was a driving force in the development of the Federal Reserve Act, the Clayton Antitrust Act, and the law establishing the Federal Trade Commission.Brandeis as an economist and moralist warned in 1914 that banking and stock brokering must be separate, and twenty years later, during the New Deal, his recommendation was finally enacted into law (the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933) but was undone by Ronald Reagan, which led to the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s and the world financial collapse of 2008.We see Brandeis, who came from a family of reformers and intellectuals who fled Europe and settled in Louisville. Brandeis the young man coming of age, who presented himself at Harvard Law School and convinced the school to admit him even though he was underage. Brandeis the lawyer and reformer, who in 1908 agreed to defend an Oregon law establishing maximum hours for women workers, and in so doing created an entirely new form of appellate brief that had only a few pages of legal citation and consisted mostly of factual references.Urofsky writes how Brandeis witnessed and suffered from the anti-Semitism rampant in the early twentieth century and, though not an observant Jew, with the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, became at age fifty-eight head of the American Zionist movement. During the next seven years, Brandeis transformed it from a marginal activity into a powerful force in American Jewish affairs. We see the brutal six-month confirmation battle after Wilson named the fifty-nine-year-old Brandeis to the court in 1916; the bitter fight between progressives and conservative leaders of the bar, finance, and manufacturing, who, while never directly attacking him as a Jew, described Brandeis as "a striver," "self-advertiser," "a disturbing element in any gentleman's club." Even the president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, signed a petition accusing Brandeis of lacking "judicial temperament." And we see, finally, how, during his twenty-three years on the court, this giant of a man and an intellect developed the modern jurisprudence of free speech, the doctrine of a constitutionally protected right to privacy, and suggested what became known as the doctrine of incorporation, by which the Bill of Rights came to apply to the states. Brandeis took his seat when the old classical jurisprudence still held sway, and he tried to teach both his colleagues and the public-- especially the law schools--that the law had to change to keep up with the economy and society. Brandeis often said, "My faith...

Publish Date
Publisher
Pantheon Books
Language
English
Pages
955

Buy this book

Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: Louis D. Brandeis
Louis D. Brandeis: a life
2009, Pantheon Books
in English
Cover of: Louis D. Brandeis
Louis D. Brandeis
2009, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Electronic resource in English

Add another edition?

Book Details


Published in

New York

Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Genre
Biography.

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
347.73/2634, B
Library of Congress
KF8745.B67 U749 2009, KF8745.B67 U748 2009

The Physical Object

Pagination
p. cm.
Number of pages
955

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL23056966M
Internet Archive
louisdbrandeisli0000urof
ISBN 13
9780375423666
LCCN
2009003992
OCLC/WorldCat
290468880
Library Thing
8372579
Goodreads
6853896

Community Reviews (0)

Feedback?
No community reviews have been submitted for this work.

Lists

This work does not appear on any lists.

History

Download catalog record: RDF / JSON
October 22, 2021 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
July 22, 2019 Edited by MARC Bot remove fake subjects
June 17, 2010 Edited by ImportBot add details from OverDrive
February 3, 2010 Edited by WorkBot add more information to works
December 9, 2009 Created by WorkBot add works page