Louis Brandeis (1856–1941,) fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis, was an American lawyer and Supreme Court associate justice 1916–39. The first Jew to sit on the high court, he is remembered as a conscious and thoughtful judge.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Brandeis was educated at Dresden and Harvard and practiced in Boston. He gained an early reputation as the “people’s attorney” by defending Boston residents seeking regulation of local public utilities without a fee. He conducted many labor arbitrations and was frequently involved in challenging the power of monopolies and cartels and cases concerning the constitutionality of maximum hours and minimum wage legislation.
Brandeis formulated the New Freedom Economic doctrine adopted by President Woodrow Wilson for his 1912 presidential campaign. Appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916, he favored governmental intervention to control the economy where public interest required it and was also a strong defender of private property rights. He supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation.
Brandeis was famous for his “Brandeis briefs,” which emphasized social facts than precedent and general arguments. Brandeis University at Waltham, Massachusetts, is named after him.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Louis Brandeis
Privacy is the right to be alone—the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized man.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Solitude
If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you.
—Louis Brandeis
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Liberty, Government, Zeal, Experience
There are no shortcuts in evolution.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Evolution
Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: One liners, Ignorance, Arguments, Argument
The most important political office is that of the private citizen
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Politics, Activism, Government
Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Oppression
The tax-exempt privilege is a feature always reflected in the market price of (municipal) bonds. The investor pays for it.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Taxes
Men long for an afterlife in which there apparently is nothing to do but delight in heaven’s wonders.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Heaven
Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Determination, Optimism, Invention, Discovery
Organization can never be a substitute for initiative and for judgment.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Judgment, Organization, Judging
The logic of words should yield to the logic of realities.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Logic
No individual should be subjected anywhere, by reason of the fact that he is a Jew, to a denial of any common right or opportunity enjoyed by non-Jews.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Jews
Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Government
No one can really pull you up very high—you lose your grip on the rope. But on your own two feet you can climb mountains.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Confidence, Self-reliance
Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Independence
America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: America
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Liberty, Freedom, Experience, Zeal
If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Reason
In the frank expression of conflicting opinions lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Government
If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means ‘to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal’ would bring terrible retribution.
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Justice, Government
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both
—Louis Brandeis
Topics: Government
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