Louis D. Brandeis
Louis D. Brandeis was an American lawyer and jurist whose career spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Born on November 13, 1856, in Louisville, Kentucky, Brandeis received his early education at Louisville Male High School before going on to study at Harvard Law School. His path from a Kentucky upbringing to one of the country's most prominent legal institutions shaped the foundation of his professional life.
After completing his education, Brandeis worked as a lawyer and eventually served as a judge. He spent much of his career in the United States, working within the American legal system and engaging with the courts and legal questions of his era. He remained a citizen of the United States throughout his life, and his work was conducted entirely in English.
Brandeis died on October 5, 1941, in Washington, D.C., having been born nearly eighty-five years earlier. His life's work was rooted in the law — as a practicing lawyer, as a jurist, and as a judge — and those roles defined the arc of his public life from his earliest professional years through to the end of his career.
Quotes by Louis D. Brandeis
Louis D. Brandeis's insights on:
It will pass like the know-nothing days, but the sense of shame and sin should endure.
Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify the oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
There is a spark of idealism within every individual which can be fanned into flame and bring forth extraordinary results.
Those who won our independence believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.
I think all of our human Experience shows that no one with absolute power can be trusted to give it up even in part.
The statement of Mr. Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Oklahoma Bank case, is significant: “We cannot say that the public interests to which we have adverted, and others, are not sufficient to warrant the State in taking the whole business of banking under its control. On the contrary we are of opinion that it may go on from regulation to prohibition except upon such conditions as it may prescribe.