Brandeis: Beyond Progressivism

Strum supplements her much-praised biography, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People , with a brief, insightful analysis of the great lawyer and judge's political thought. The 85-year-old Brandeis died in 1941. Though New Dealers saw his opposition to large institutions as nostalgic and naive, Strum suggests that Brandeis's pragmatic approach to social problems remains relevant. She sketches his evolution from economic conservatism to egalitarianism, showing how his experiences--investigating crooked insurance companies in Massachusetts, analyzing the conditions that led to violence in the Homestead steel strike in 1892, learning about the communal Jewish kibbutzim in Palestine, introducing the sociological ``Brandeis brief'' to Supreme Court advocacy--shaped his thought. Before he joined the Supreme Court, on which he served between 1916 and 1939, Brandies argued in a speech that the Constitution's right to life implied a minimal level of freedom from want; as a justice, the forward-looking Brandeis emphasized the importance of individual rights of speech and privacy. Strum concludes that, since Brandeis's thought was derived from ``the American experiences of industrialization,'' his ideas mainly addressed economics and that he was less concerned with issues of sexism and racism. (Sept.)