Adam Cohen: Looking Back on Louis Brandeis on His 150th Birthday
In 1908, Louis Brandeis turned American law on its head with the “Brandeis brief.” The Supreme Court was in the midst of the notorious Lochner era, in which a pro-business majority routinely struck down laws protecting workers’ health and safety. Brandeis was defending an Oregon law that limited women’s workdays to 10 hours. It seemed likely the court would rule, as it just had in a similar case, that maximum-hours laws violated employers’ “right of free contract.”
In his brief, Brandeis devoted just two pages to legal analysis. He spent more than 100 pages setting out statistical and sociological data on the harm that long workdays did to women. His use of facts and sociological arguments was both shocking and enormously successful. The court upheld Oregon’s law, 9 to 0.
Brandeis, whose crusades against insurance companies and banks earned him the title “the people’s lawyer,” was born 150 years ago this week. He has many claims to fame: champion of the New Deal, first Jewish Supreme Court justice, creator of the legal doctrine of privacy. But it is Brandeis’s insistence on injecting facts and real-world analysis into the law that is his most lasting achievement, and one that resounds especially strongly today, when “reality-based” logic is so embattled.
Brandeis was born in Louisville, Ky., shortly before the start of the Civil War. As a Southerner and the son of a small merchant, he grew up with a Jeffersonian mistrust of big business. He entered Harvard Law School in 1875, and after graduating first in his class, remained in Boston to practice law. As a young lawyer, he co-wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review, “The Right to Privacy,” that Roscoe Pound, dean of the law school, would later say “did nothing less than add a chapter to our law.”
Brandeis was drawn to social causes. His first major victory was blocking a company from securing a monopolistic right to operate Boston’s subway system. Later, as special counsel to the Interstate Commerce Commission, he took on the railroad barons, insisting that they should not get rate increases “so long as the vicious system of interlocking directorates makes it impossible to know how much of the money is honestly and efficiently spent.”
And he fought for workers. ...
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In his brief, Brandeis devoted just two pages to legal analysis. He spent more than 100 pages setting out statistical and sociological data on the harm that long workdays did to women. His use of facts and sociological arguments was both shocking and enormously successful. The court upheld Oregon’s law, 9 to 0.
Brandeis, whose crusades against insurance companies and banks earned him the title “the people’s lawyer,” was born 150 years ago this week. He has many claims to fame: champion of the New Deal, first Jewish Supreme Court justice, creator of the legal doctrine of privacy. But it is Brandeis’s insistence on injecting facts and real-world analysis into the law that is his most lasting achievement, and one that resounds especially strongly today, when “reality-based” logic is so embattled.
Brandeis was born in Louisville, Ky., shortly before the start of the Civil War. As a Southerner and the son of a small merchant, he grew up with a Jeffersonian mistrust of big business. He entered Harvard Law School in 1875, and after graduating first in his class, remained in Boston to practice law. As a young lawyer, he co-wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review, “The Right to Privacy,” that Roscoe Pound, dean of the law school, would later say “did nothing less than add a chapter to our law.”
Brandeis was drawn to social causes. His first major victory was blocking a company from securing a monopolistic right to operate Boston’s subway system. Later, as special counsel to the Interstate Commerce Commission, he took on the railroad barons, insisting that they should not get rate increases “so long as the vicious system of interlocking directorates makes it impossible to know how much of the money is honestly and efficiently spent.”
And he fought for workers. ...