Here are the definitive biographies of Justices Louis Brandeis and Thurgood Marshall. Both are inspiring.
Louis D. Brandeis: A Life By Melvin Urofsky Pantheon, 2009, 976 pages
Louis Brandeis was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1916 by President Wilson, and served until 1939. He is considered an extraordinary justice because of his mastery of procedural details, his comprehensive research of the facts and the law in each case, and the great clarity and logic of his opinions.
Brandeis was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of Jewish immigrants. He entered Harvard Law School when he was
eighteen, and graduated in 1877 with the highest grade average in the school’s history.
As a “people’s lawyer” he championed individual rights, defended worker protection and labor laws, and fought against powerful corporations, monopolies, and public corruption. He also helped create the Federal Reserve System.
His nomination to the Supreme Court was bitterly contested not only because he was Jewish, but also because, as Justice William O. Douglas noted, he was incorruptible. As Supreme Court Justice, Brandeis’s opinions famously included a strong defense of free speech and the right to privacy.
He wrote hundreds of opinions, but the one with the greatest impact on the law—particularly American federalism—may have been Erie Railroad v. Tompkins in 1938. In Erie, the plaintiff brought a personal injury action in federal court because Pennsylvania law was more favorable to the defendant. Erie established the modern doctrine of diversity jurisdiction for federal courts, which essentially says a federal judge can’t make new common law in contradiction to judge-made state law. So the decision prevents the federal government from stealing powers that the Constitution reserved to the states. Erie also discouraged “forum shopping” by plaintiffs in civil actions.
Brandeis was active in the Zionist movement, seeing it as a solution to anti-Semitism in Europe and Russia, while reviving “the Jewish spirit.” He died in 1941.
Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary By Juan Williams Three Rivers Press, 2000, 504 pages
Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1967 by President Johnson, and served until 1991. He was admired more as a civil rights litigator than as a justice. His greatest achievement may have been winning the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. Brown overturned the “separate but equal” system of apartheid in education that had been established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.
“He led a civil rights revolution in the 20th century that forever changed the landscape of American society,” writes Williams, a Washington Post correspondent, TV commentator, and, until he slurred Muslims on the “The O’Reilly Factor” in October 2010, an NPR journalist. By working through the courts “to eradicate the legacy of slavery and [destroy] the racist segregation system of Jim Crow,” Marshall “had an even more profound and lasting effect on race relations than either…Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X.” (Williams is also the author of Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965.)
Marshall was born in Baltimore in 1908. His great-grandfather was a slave. He graduated first in his class from the historically black Howard University School of Law—having been rejected by the University of Maryland School of Law because of its segregation policy. Years later he successfully sued the University of Maryland for that policy (Murray v. Pearson, 1936).
As an NAACP lawyer, he won his first case (of many to come) before the Supreme Court in 1940, at the age of 32. Later that year he was appointed chief counsel for the NAACP. John Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961; and Lyndon Johnson appointed him solicitor general in 1965, in preparation for the high court nomination.
Williams respectfully glosses over Marshall’s history of heavy drinking and womanizing.
As a Supreme Court justice, he compiled a liberal record that included support of affirmative action and abortion, opposition to the death penalty, and protection of the rights of criminal suspects. But the Supreme Court years are anticlimactic in a heroic, combative, and courageous life, and this part of the biography is slow. Marshall died in 2001.
About the review Dave Freedman is a financial and legal journalist based in Chicago.
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