Louis D. Brandeis: A Life
by Melvin Urofsky
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Book Summary Information
Author: Melvin UrofskyEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2009-09-22
ISBN: 0375423664
Number of pages: 976
Publisher: Pantheon
Book Reviews of Louis D. Brandeis: A Life
Book Review: Urofsky is to judicial biography what McCullough is to Presidential biography
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of Louis D. Brandeis: A Life
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 in time is great.? Eventually the Supreme Court adopted every one of his dissents as the correct constitutional interpretation.
A huge and galvanizing biography, a revelation of one man?s effect on American society and jurisprudence, and the electrifying story of his time.
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