Synopsis
The first full-scale biography in twenty-five years of one of the most important and distinguished justices to sit on the Supreme Court—an audio book that reveals Louis D. Brandeis the reformer, lawyer, and jurist, and Brandeis the man, in all of his complexity, passion, and wit.
As a lawyer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he pioneered how modern law is practiced. The author of the right to privacy he led the way in creating the role of the lawyer as counselor and pioneered the idea of pro bono publico work by attorneys.
Named to the Supreme Court, Brandeis, ranked as one of the nation's leading progressive reformers. He invented savings bank life insurance in Massachusetts 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.
As an economist...
The New York Times Book Review - Alan M. Dershowitz
Melvin I. Urofsky…the author of this monumental, authoritative and appreciative biography…has devoted much of his career to documenting the personal and professional life of the great lawyer and justice. In Louis D. Brandeis: A Life, he demonstrates, deploying a Brandeisian array of factual material, why Brandeis still matters, nearly 70 years after his death. The First Amendment's right of free expression, the Fourth Amendment's right to privacy and the due process clause's focus on personal liberty (rather than property) all owe their current vitality to the creative genius of Justice Brandeis, whose dissenting opinions have become the law of the land…Although this is an admiring biography, it is far from hagiographic. Urofsky presents the warts, few as there were.