Louis Brandeis

Who was Louis Brandeis?

Louis Dembitz Brandeis was an American lawyer and associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939.

He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish immigrant parents from Bohemia, who raised him in a secular home. He attended Harvard Law School, graduating at the age of twenty with the highest grade average in the law school's history.

Brandeis settled in Boston where he founded a law firm and became a recognized lawyer through his work on progressive social causes. Starting in 1890, he helped develop the "right to privacy" concept by writing a Harvard Law Review article of that title, and was thereby credited by legal scholar Roscoe Pound as having accomplished "nothing less than adding a chapter to our law". He later published a book titled Other People's Money And How the Bankers Use It, suggesting ways of curbing the power of large banks and money trusts, which partly explains why he later fought against powerful corporations, monopolies, public corruption, and mass consumerism, all of which he felt were detrimental to American values and culture. He also became active in the Zionist movement, seeing it as a solution to antisemitism in Europe and Russia, while at the same time being a way to "revive the Jewish spirit."