Louis D. Brandeis
- Gender: Male
- Citizenship: United States
- Born: Nov 13, 1856
- Died: Oct 5, 1941
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.
The most important political office is that of the private citizen.
politics
In the frank expression of conflicting opinions lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action.
wisdom
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
politics & respect
There are no shortcuts in evolution.
science
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
experience & government
Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
history
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
great