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Louis D. Brandeis: A Life

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This new biography of Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) is the most extensive study we have of the Justice. It runs over 900 pages including extensive notes. Who better to undertake such a task than Professor Urofsky, who has edited 7 volumes of Brandeis letters, written several prior book-length studies of the Justice, and authored numerous articles discussing his activities. While there are a number of earlier biographies of the Justice, including the classic by Alpheus Mason ("Brandeis: A Free Man's Life" [1946]), this is by far the most extensive and thorough look we are likely to have of Brandeis and his life. The author does a nice job of balancing LDB's professional activities with his private life. Urofsky came to know the Justice's two daughters (now deceased) while working on the letters volumes with David Levy, and they shared family photographs and recollections of their father and mother with him. He also has had extensive contact with the surviving Brandeis grandchildren, as least one of whom like Urofsky is involved in the work of the Supreme Court Historical Society here in Washington.

Urofsky focuses on several topics not extensively covered in the earlier biographies. First, the Justice's wife, Alice, much as Holmes' wife and Frankfurter's spouse, suffered from period of mental exhaustion which required treatment including hospitalization on occasion, although her condition improved substantially over time. Their relationship is essential to understanding the world in which LDB lived, and Urofsky's discussion puts this situation into proper context. The second area where Urofsky departs from previous biographies is his exhaustive discussion of LDB's Zionist activities. He is well qualified to address this aspect of LDB's life since he has written a history of American Zionism. Urofsky is nothing if not thorough, but I sometimes wondered if quite so much of this very long biography (I would estimate 15%-20%) needed to be devoted to LDB's Zionist activities. Other biographers have discussed his Zionist leadership, but in far less space; on the other hand, they did not have Urofksy's intimate knowledge of the history of American Zionism and Brandeis' role. There is no question that Zionism became a major, or the major, interest of LDB beginning in 1912 and continuing for the remainder of his life. So the attention Urofsky devotes to this aspect of the Justice's life is certainly merited. He has convinced me that you can't fully understand LDB without an awareness of this aspect of his life.

While Urofsky is respectful of Brandeis, he recognizes some of the LDB's shortcoming as well. Was LDB perhaps "cold, haughty, disdainful"? He certainly had no sense of humor and was somewhat distant. Urofsky also questions Brandeis' own view that he had an internal ethical sense which would foreclose him from ever acting inappropriately, hence he could advise Presidents, subsidize Frankfurter's political activities, and act as "counsel to the situation" in a dispute on behalf of all parties. In short, this is quite a well "balanced" biography not hagiography. One of the most valuable aspects of the book is found in the 142 pages of endnotes--a treasure chest of research for those interested in probing further into the life of this fascinating Justice. The photographic research is also outstanding and adds to the impact of the text. The book is comprehensive--covering LDB from his early years in Kentucky through building his law practice, his period as the "People's Attorney," working with Woodrow Wilson, his tough confirmation battle, his 23 years on the Supreme Court, his leadership of American Zionism, and his warm family relationships. A most complete study of this most complex of individuals.

Mr. Urofsky has written an excellent and exhaustive (at nearly a thousand pages) biography of the lawyer who was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916. A progressive judge who believed in judical restraint, Louis Brandeis' legal dissents later became the basis of law and his support of a Jewish homeland later became Israel. He was born before the Civil War and died just before Pearl Harbor. The author has written a readable and understandable life of law, and of the political tides of Justice Brandeis' long life (he died at 85).

The author has written a detailed account of one of the most eminent lawyers and judges of our country, Brandeis. Brandeis was a brilliant and perceptive jurist and he was part of what is now the bases of many of what we accept as common "rights" as citizens of the United States.

The biography is long and detailed and is probably one of the best biographies on Brandeis that I have read. Rather than detail the book I want to use two episodes in Brandeis life as discussed in the book to make a few points.

First, the issue of the right to privacy. On pp 99-102 the author describes the seminal paper by Warren and Brandeis entitled "The Right to Privacy" which as the author does state is in many ways a right to be left alone, a right to anonymity. The fact is that there is no such right in the Constitution and that Warren and Brandeis, truly Brandeis alone if one understands the author, develops such "right" from well established common law principles. This was a brilliant paper and in many ways is as important today and it was over a hundred years ago. It would have been interesting for the author to detail this paper a bit more. The author returns to this topic of privacy in the discussion of the Olmstead case on pp 628-632. This was the first wiretapping case where the Court ruled that there was no need for a warrant and thus no 4th Amendment protection. Brandeis' writing on his dissent is quite telling and it should have gotten a bit more coverage by the author. Brandeis states in his dissent:

"Of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers, from the inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all others would lose half their value."

To me this needs a substantially longer discussion but the author does do it some credit.

The second issue is the relationship between Brandeis and Taylor and Galbreth, both early 20th century management consultants. There is a recent article in The New Yorker by Jill Lepore, a superb piece of critical and historical analysis of Brandeis, which discusses this relationship in detail and presents many of the weaknesses in Brandeis. Lepore looks at Brandeis through the lens of the management and efficiency consultants, in may ways the hucksters who predated the current Business Schools. She starts her article by stating:

"Ordering people around, which used to be just a way to get things done, was elevated to a science in October of 1910, when Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from Boston, held a meeting at an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts who, at Brandeis's urging, decided to call what they were experts at "scientific management." Everyone there--including Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, best known today as the parents in "Cheaper by the Dozen"--had contracted "Tayloritis": they were enthralled by an industrial engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had been ordering people around, scientifically, for years."

The essence of the tale is that Brandeis, who at the time was sitting on a regulatory body which controlled the monopoly like rates of railroadsm had gotten enthralled with the less than scientific work of Taylor and the Gilbreths. He then saw that railroads should employ these new management techniques and then lower their rates. Simple, except as Lepore states, the Taylor results were a fraud! Perhaps there is a lesson here for many other "scientifically" based causes seeking legal justification. Brandeis was a brilliant legal scholar, however he had no expertise in the area of actually running a company. He did however understand the "books" and "records" of a company and as such he had used this profitably in his law practice. Yet the Taylor approach assumed you looked forward and not backward, that you understood the business as a living entity and not just the records of what happened. Brandeis was a lawyer at heart, as such he always looked backwards for precedent.

The author of the present biography gives, in my opinion, short shrift to this issue discussed by Lepore. He covers it on pp 240-243 but his discussion misses the key point presented by Lepore. Namely that Brandies became enamored with Taylor and Galbreth and that Taylor according to Lepore was somewhat of a fraud, the Taylor data it is alleged was all fabricated, and Galbreth had little if any basis for his facts and recommendations.

The author has done a superb job at writing the biography. Yet it does have in my opinion certain weaknesses. In certain parts of the text the sentences are wonderful but the paragraphs do not hold together, there is jumping around in time and in concepts being discussed. In contrast, the Lepore article has a style that is quite readable, whereas that of Urofsky is at times cumbersome and pedantic. As stated in my discussion of privacy and "management", Brandeis set the gold standard for privacy and I believe Urofsky could have taken that further, and with Taylor and Galbreth, I believe Brandeis just did not do his home work, and this was a failing.

In "Louis D. Brandeis: A Life," author Melvin Urofsky has achieved, above all, three things--a history of the life and times of an American who put an indelible mark on his country at a time of monumental political, intellectual, and social change, encompassed by the progressive era; of a liberal Jew who helped in integrating the Jewish religion and culture into the American mainstream, while at the same time playing an important role in the development of Zionism; and who as a justice on the United States Supreme court helped reshape the legal foundations of the Amerian republic to the benefit of a broader population base.

This book is fascinating. It is more than just a history of Louis Brandeis. This is history of this country, and the time that Brandeis lived in this country. It also shows the change in the legal profession, the views of the Supreme Courty, and the policical history of that time. It also is a history of Jews in the United states, and how they progressed. I had not realized that Brandeis was was as critical to Zionism as he was until I read this book. It is a book that you cannot put down. If you want to understand the legal and political history of the United States, this is a book that you must read.

It is evident that Urofsky is an outstanding history professor at UCV because the chapters of this book are pedagogically arranged like a syllabus for a graduate-level seminar course. This book is lengthy and comprehensive, but easily digested and well organized. I am a big fan of David McCullough's presidential biographies (Truman, John Adams) because McCullough takes that same professorial approach to the organization and content of his writing. Urofsky is in the same league as McCullough.
Before reading this book, I knew Brandeis only for his infamous Brandeis Brief in Muller v. Oregon and his tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court. This book shows that those events were mere chapters in the extraordinary life of Brandeis. That is why I also recommend this book to anyone who may not necessarily be interested in Brandeis or the Supreme Court, but who simply enjoys the study of U.S. history.
Brandeis is the product of the Progressive Era, and this book provides a deep and scholarly understanding of that era, including some in-depth coverage of other notable Progressive Era figures, such as Robert LaFollette and Woodrow Wilson. Urofsky does not even discuss Brandeis's tenure on the Supreme Court until more than half way through the book. The first half mostly covers Brandeis's various reform movements, including his efforts to change industrial insurance into savings bank insurance, his infamous law review article on the right to privacy that later became the springboard for a new area of tort law, his fight against railroad monopolies, his role as mediator in the early days of the unionized labor movement, his shakedown of the Taft Administration in the Pinchot-Bollinger affair (an interesting foreshadow of the tensions to come when Brandeis and Taft would later serve together on the U.S. Supreme Court), and his wise counsel to Woodrow Wilson during the 1912 Presidential campaign.
Urofsky's professorial approach enables the average reader to clearly understand the complex historical, political, social and moral background for each of these reform movements. For example, Urofsky provides a simplified "Business 101 style" explanation of the insurance industry, which gives Brandeis's reform efforts in that area a perspective that any other historian might overlook. As another example, Urofsky provides a clear context of American Zionism (Jewish-American awareness of the need for a Jewish homeland in Palestine) against the backdrop of Teddy Roosevelt's suspicion of hyphenated Americans (Roosevelt believed you had to be either Jewish or American but not Jewish-American).
For those readers who are interested in the U.S. Supreme Court, this book includes a wealth of history, with detailed chapters on Brandeis's confirmation process (he was almost Borked decades before Borking became a verb in the English vocabulary), the inner workings of the Supreme Court in the early 20th Century in surprisingly sharp contrast to the modern Court (for example, the Justices worked out of their homes because they didn't have private chambers and they paid their law clerks out of their own pockets), and Brandeis's jurisprudence (particularly his contribution to the birth of administrative law).
For those who are interested Brandeis as an historical figure, the book is an exhaustive biography summed up best by the first sentence of Chapter 2: "Throughout his life, Louis Brandeis had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, and the courage and perspicacity to grasp the opportunities before him." The book is loaded with stories of such places, times and opportunities, most notably Brandeis's time as a student at Harvard Law School at the point in history when Langdell changed the course of legal education, but also his humble Louisville roots and his brief stop in St. Louis. In sum, this biography shows (as promised in the author's introduction) that Brandeis was idealistic (a true figure of turn-of-the-20th-century progressivism comparable to LaFollette), pragmatic (formulated the most expedient means to achieve his idealist ends), and prescient (warned against "the curse of bigness" more than one hundred years before the U.S. government bailed out businesses that were "too big to fail"). Hope these are enough reasons to buy this book.

Roosevelt referred to him as Isaiah. Louis Brandeis was an idealist. Idealism was wed to pragmatism. Born before the Civil War, he almost survived to witness the entry of the United States into World War II. He demonstrated how law could be an instrument of reform. He was born and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. When Brandeis entered Harvard Law School, Christopher Langdell was introducing the case method of law study. Brandeis was a fervent supporter of the method. His connection to Harvard was lifelong. Brandeis encouraged Felix Frankfurter to work on case books for administrative law and federal jurisdiction and supplied funds to help the cause. He was the first Justice to cite a HARVARD LAW REVIEW article in an opinion.

Brandeis spent more than thirty-seven years in the practice of law in Boston until his appointment to the Supreme Court by Woodrow Wilson in 1916. His interest in reform placed him in a position of opposition to the State Street interests. His areas of activity included manufacturing, labor, street cars, railroads, gas companies, and life insurance. For reform to succeed one had to play the political game he was led to conclude. The brief in MULLER v. OREGON used sociological material and became a model, the Brandeis brief, for the introduction of nontraditional sources in court cases. Louis and his partner, Sam Warren, wrote an oft-cited law review article in 1895 sketching out a claim for a right of privacy, the right to be left alone.

Justice Brandeis believed the function of his law clerks was to correct his errors. He was not paternal. He called his clerks by their last names. David Riesman considered Brandeis an ideal judge. (By the time of Great Depression, Brandeis had, in his earlier work, all of its causes.) Justice Brandeis never assigned the statement of facts to his clerks. Brandeis served on the Court for nearly twenty-three terms. In dissents Brandeis sought to be persuasive and instructive. Harold Laski wrote to compliment Brandeis on his opinions. Holmes and Brandeis served together on the Court for sixteen years. Many of Brandeis's dissents became accepted by the Court. In the twenties the Court's majority hewed to classical legal thought based upon the freedom of contract and substantive due process.

In 1932 Cardozo took Holmes's place on the Court. Roosevelt's court-packing plan alienated Brandeis and the other Justices. Acknowledgments, Notes, and Index appear at the end of this wonderful biography. Do not be mislead by my somewhat dry statements, this book is filled with human descriptions and details and should be of great interest to historians, law students and lawyers, and general readers.

This is one of the best books I have ever read on the law. Every attorney, judge, law professor, and law student should read this book. It not only describes a life well lived, it describes an important era in American legal history. I learned more of true significance about several courses in law school (including constitutional law, economic regulation, and antitrust) than I learned in law school.

This is a detailed but highly readable account of a truly extraordinary, inspiring person. Most of us, even lawyers, know Brandeis from a few famous Supreme Court opinions (and because a university bears his name). But he was 60 by the time he joined the Supreme Court. Unlike many on the current high court, Brandeis would have been an important force in American history had he never been appointed to the bench. A force in turn-of-the-century progressive thought and action, he exemplifies a life lived in the public interest, in making the world a better place for others. He also demonstrates how one can use a perch as a private lawyer to fight for and effect social reform. He should inspire all of us to "do something"! Reading this book, we should be thankful to the author for an inspiring journey.

Mr. Urofsky has written a very deep and informative biography on Justice Brandeis, detailing not only his professional, but his private life as well. Although not a Chief Justice, Justice Brandeis was one of the most influential Justices in the history of the Supreme Court. He was influential in dealing with labor laws, and helped create the Federal Reserve System and presented ideas for the Federal Trade Commission. He was also one of the greatest defenders of the right to privacy and free speech. This book also discloses his involvement in the Zionist movement. An excellent that I highly recommend.