He provided the famous fact-laden "Brandeis brief" to the Supreme Court in Muller v. He also created the first "sliding scale" for gas and electric rate regulation in America. Early in his life he took on the West End Street Railway into Boston and pushed through a tunnel-building scheme that allowed the city to build and own a new tunnel and to use it to regulate the railway's rates. But as he himself said, he preferred not to be tied down to particular clients, and he aimed to be the "counsel to the situation." This meant he was often the mediator or the negotiator in a host of what he called his "pet reforms". In the early 20th century Brandeis became known as the "People's Attorney" for taking on cases for labor unions, utility consumers and others. This book is an extensive, probably too extensive, look at an undeniably fascinating man. In this award-winning biography, Melvin Urofsky gives us a panoramic view of Brandeis’s unprecedented impact on American society and law.
During the brutal six-month congressional confirmation battle that ensued when Woodrow Wilson nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1916, Brandeis was described as “a disturbing element in any gentlemen’s club.” But once on the Court, he became one of its most influential members, developing the modern jurisprudence of free speech and the doctrine of a constitutionally protected right to privacy and suggesting what became known as the doctrine of incorporation, by which the Bill of Rights came to apply to the states. Brandeis invented savings bank life insurance in Massachusetts and was a driving force in the development of the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Reserve Act, and the law establishing the Federal Trade Commission.īrandeis witnessed and suffered from the anti-Semitism rampant in the United States in the early twentieth century, and with the outbreak of World War I, became at age fifty-eight the head of the American Zionist movement. He was an early champion of the right to privacy and pioneer the idea of pro bono work by attorneys.
As a young lawyer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Louis Brandeis, born into a family of reformers who came to the United States to escape European anti-Semitism, established the way modern law is practiced.
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