Brandeis, Louis D.
| Louis Dembitz Brandeis |
|
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
|
In office
June 1, 1916[1] – February 13, 1939 |
| Nominated by |
Woodrow Wilson |
| Preceded by |
Joseph Rucker Lamar |
| Succeeded by |
William O. Douglas |
|
| Born |
November 13, 1856(1856-11-13)
Louisville, Kentucky |
| Died |
October 5, 1941(1941-10-05) (aged 84)
Washington, D.C. |
| Spouse(s) |
Alice Goldmark |
| Alma mater |
Harvard Law School |
| Religion |
Judaism |
Louis Dembitz Brandeis (pronounced /ˈbrændaɪs/; November 13, 1856 – October 5, 1941) was an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Europe. He enrolled at Harvard Law School, graduating at the age of twenty with the highest grade average in the college’s history.
Brandeis settled in Boston where he became a recognized lawyer through his work on social causes that would benefit society. 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". Years later, a book he published, entitled Other People's Money, suggested 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. He also became active in the Zionist movement, seeing it as a solution to the "Jewish problem" of antisemitism in Europe and Russia, while at the same time being a way to "revive the Jewish spirit."
When his family’s finances became secure, he began devoting most of his time to public causes and was later dubbed the “People’s Lawyer.” He insisted on serving on cases without pay so that he would be free to address the wider issues involved. The Economist magazine calls him "A Robin Hood of the law." Among his notable early cases were actions fighting railroad monopolies; defending workplace and labor laws; helping create the Federal Reserve System; and presenting ideas for the new Federal Trade Commission (FTC). He achieved recognition by submitting a case brief, later called the "Brandeis Brief," which relied on expert testimony from people in other professions to support his case, thereby setting a new precedent in evidence presentation.
In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson nominated Brandeis to become a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. However, his nomination was bitterly contested, partly because, as Justice William O. Douglas wrote, "Brandeis was a militant crusader for social justice whoever his opponent might be. He was dangerous not only because of his brilliance, his arithmetic, his courage. He was dangerous because he was incorruptible. . . [and] the fears of the Establishment were greater because Brandeis was the first Jew to be named to the Court." He was eventually confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 47 to 22 on June 1, 1916, and became one of the most famous and influential figures ever to serve on the high court. His opinions were, according to legal scholars, some of the “greatest defenses” of freedom of speech and the right to privacy ever written by a member of the high court.
[edit] Early life
[edit] Family roots
Louis Dembitz Brandeis was born on November 13, 1856, in Louisville, Kentucky, the youngest of four children. His parents, Adolph Brandeis and Frederika Dembitz, both of whom were Jewish, emigrated to the United States from their childhood homes in Prague, Czech Republic (then part of Austrian Empire). They emigrated as part of their extended families for both economic and political reasons. The Revolutions of 1848 had produced a series of political upheavals and the families, though "liberal in their political views and sympathetic to the rebel cause," were "shocked by the anti-Semitic riots that erupted in Prague while the city was in the hands of the Czech rebels."[2]:55 In addition, the Habsburg Empire had imposed business taxes on Jews. Family elders sent Adolph Brandeis to America to observe and prepare for his family's possible emigration. He spent a few months in the Midwest and was impressed by the nation's institutions and by the tolerance among the people he met. He wrote home to his wife, "America's progress is the triumph of the rights of man."[2]:56
The Brandeis family chose to settle in Louisville partly because it was a prosperous river port. Louis's father developed a grain-merchandising business but suffered setbacks during the depression of the 1870s.[3]:121 His earliest childhood was also shaped by the American Civil War, which forced the family to seek safety temporarily in Indiana. The Brandeis family held abolitionist beliefs that angered their Louisville neighbors.[2]:57
[edit] Family life
The Brandeises were considered a "cultured family," trying not to discuss business or money during dinner, preferring subjects related to history, politics, and culture, or their daily experiences. Having been raised partly on German culture, Louis read and appreciated the writings of Goethe and Schiller, and his favorite composers were Beethoven and Schumann.[2]
In their religious beliefs, although his family was Jewish, only his extended family practiced a more conservative form of Judaism, while his parents practiced a more relaxed form. They celebrated the main Christian holidays along with most of their community,[3] even treating Christmas as a secular holiday. His parents raised their children to be "high-minded idealists," rather than depending solely on religion for their purpose and inspiration.[2] In later years, his mother, Frederika, wrote of this period:
- "I believe that only goodness and truth and conduct that is humane and self-sacrificing toward those who need us can bring God nearer to us ... I wanted to give my children the purest spirit and the highest ideals as to morals and love. God has blessed my endeavors."[4]:28
According to biographer Melvin Urofsky, Brandeis was influenced greatly by his uncle Lewis Naphtali Dembitz. Unlike other members of the extended Brandeis family, Dembitz regularly practiced Judaism and was actively involved in Zionist activities. Brandeis later changed his middle name from David to Dembitz in honor of his uncle and, through his uncle's model of social activism, became an active member of the Zionist movement later in his life.[5]:18
[edit] Childhood education
Louis grew up in "a family enamored with books, music, and politics, perhaps best typified by his revered uncle, Lewis Dembitz, a refined, educated man who served as a delegate to the Republican convention in 1860 that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president."[3]
In school, Louis was a serious student in languages and other basic courses and usually achieved top scores. Brandeis graduated from the Louisville Male High School at age 14 with the highest honors. When he was sixteen, the Louisville University of the Public Schools awarded him a gold medal for "excellence in all his studies."[6]:10 Then, in 1872, Adolph Brandeis sought to escape the enduring depression by relocating the family to Europe. After a period spent traveling, Louis spent two years studying at the Annen-Realschule in Dresden, Germany, where he excelled. He later credited his capacity for critical thinking and his desire to study law in the United States to his time there.[3]
[edit] Law school
Returning to the U.S. in 1875, Brandeis entered Harvard Law School at the age of nineteen. It was his admiration for wide learning and debating skills of his uncle, Lewis Dembitz, that inspired him to study law.[2]:58 Despite the fact that he entered the school without any formal training or financial help from his family, he became "an extraordinary student".[3]
During his time at Harvard, the teaching of law was undergoing a change of method from the traditional, memorization-reliant, "black letter" case law, to a more flexible and interactive Socratic method, using prior cases as the basis for discussion to instruct students in legal reasoning. Brandeis easily adapted to the new methods, soon became active in class discussions,[2] and joined the Pow-Wow club, similar to today's moot courts in law school, which gave him experience in the role of a judge.[3]:122
In a letter while at Harvard, he wrote of his "desperate longing for more law" and of the "almost ridiculous pleasure which the discovery or invention of a legal theory gives me." He referred to the law as his "mistress," holding a grip on him that he could not break.[7]
Unfortunately, his eyesight began failing as a result of the large volume of required reading and the poor visibility under gaslights. The school doctors suggested he give up school entirely. However, he found another alternative: paying fellow law students to read the textbooks aloud, while he tried to memorize the legal principles. Despite the difficulties, his academic work and memorization talents were so impressive that he graduated as valedictorian and achieved the highest grade point average in the history of the school,[3]:122 a record that stood for eight decades.[2] Brandeis wrote of that period: "Those years were among the happiest of my life. I worked! For me, the world's center was Cambridge."[4]:47
[edit] Early career in law
Photo of Louis Brandeis (circa 1900)
After graduation, he stayed on at Harvard for another year, where he continued to study law on his own while also earning a small income by tutoring other law students. In 1878 he was admitted to the Missouri bar[8] and accepted a job with a law firm in St. Louis, where he filed his first brief and published his first law review article.[2] However, after seven months, he tired of the minor casework and accepted an offer by his Harvard classmate, Samuel Warren, to set up a law firm in Boston. They were close friends at Harvard where Warren ranked second in the class to Brandeis's first. Warren was also the son of a wealthy Boston family and their new firm was able to benefit from his family's connections.[2]:59
Soon after returning to Boston, while waiting for the law firm to gain clients, he was appointed law clerk to Horace Gray, the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, where he worked for two years. He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar without taking an examination, which he later wrote to his brother, was "contrary to all principle and precedent." According to Klebanow and Jonas, "the speed with which he was admitted probably was due to his high standing with his former professors at Harvard Law as well as to the influence of Chief Justice Gray."[2]:59
[edit] First law firm: Warren and Brandeis
The new firm was eventually successful, having gained new clients from within the state and in several neighboring states as well. Their "former professors referred a number of clients to the two fledgling lawyers,"[2] garnering Brandeis more financial security and the freedom to eventually take an active role in progressive causes.
As partner in his law firm, he worked as a consultant and advisor to businesses, but was also as a litigator "who reveled in the challenge of the courtroom." In a letter to his brother, he writes, "There is a certain joy in the exhaustion and backache of a long trial which shorter skirmishes cannot afford."[2] On November 6, 1889, he pleaded for the first time before the U.S. Supreme Court as the Eastern counsel of the Wisconsin Central Railroad and won. Not long after that, Chief Justice Melville Fuller recommended him to a friend as the best attorney he knew of in the Eastern U.S.[9]
Before taking on business clients, he insisted they agree to two major conditions: "first, that he would never have to deal with intermediaries, but only with the person in charge...[and] second, that he must be permitted to offer advice on any and all aspects of the firm's affairs" that seemed relevant. He saw himself as a "counselor at law," rather than simply a strategist in lawsuits. He preferred helping clients avoid such events as lawsuits, strikes, or other crises, by giving early advice.[2] Brandeis explained: "I would rather have clients than be somebody's lawyer."[4]:86 In a note found among his papers, he reminded himself to "advise client on what he should have, not what he wants."[4]:20
Brandeis describes how he saw himself as an advisor:
- Of course there is an immense amount of litigation going on and a great deal of the time of many lawyers is devoted to litigation. But by far the greater part of the work done by lawyers is not done in court at all, but in advising men in important matters, and mainly in business affairs....So, some of the ablest American lawyers of this generation, after acting as professional advisers of great corporations, became finally their managers.[10]
Brandeis was "unusual among lawyers" because he consistently turned away cases he considered bad. If he believed a client to be in the wrong, "either he would persuade his clients to make amends ... or he would withdraw from the case."[2] Once, uncertain as to the rightness of his client's case, he wrote the client, "The position that I should take if I remained in the case would be to give everybody a square deal."[4]:233
[edit] Common law and the right to privacy
Between 1888 and 1890, Brandeis and his law partner, Samuel Warren, wrote three scholarly articles published in the Harvard Law Review. The third, "The Right to Privacy," was the most important, with legal scholar Roscoe Pound saying it accomplished "nothing less than adding a chapter to our law."[11]
Brandeis and Warren discussed "snapshot photography," a recent innovation in journalism, that allowed newspapers to publish photographs and statements of individuals without obtaining their consent. They argued that private individuals were being continually injured and that the practice weakened the "moral standards of society as a whole."[2]:61[12] They wrote:[12]
- That the individual shall have full protection in person and in property is a principle as old as the common law; but it has been found necessary from time to time to define anew the exact nature and extent of such protection. Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society.
- The press is overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Gossip is no longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious, but has become a trade, which is pursued with industry as well as effrontery. To satisfy a prurient taste the details of sexual relations are spread broadcast in the columns of the daily papers....The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.
Legal historian Wayne McIntosh wrote that "the privacy tort of Brandeis and Warren set the nation on a legal trajectory of such profound magnitude that it finally transcended its humble beginnings."[13]:24 State courts and legislatures quickly drew on Brandeis and Warren's work. In 1905 the Georgia Supreme Court recognized a right to privacy in a case involving photographs. By 1909, California, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Utah had passed statutes establishing the right. In 1939 the American Law Institute's Restatement of Torts also recognized a right to privacy at common law. Years later, after becoming a justice on the Supreme Court, Brandeis discussed the right to privacy in his famous dissent in: Olmstead v. United States.
[edit] Personal life and marriage
Brandeis in his canoe. Circa 1916.
Brandeis became engaged to Alice Goldmark, of New York, in 1890. He was then thirty-four years of age and had previously found little time for courtship. Alice was the daughter of a physician who had emigrated to America from Austria after the collapse of the Revolution of 1848. They were married on March 23, 1891, at the home of her parents in New York City in a civil ceremony. The newlywed couple moved into a modest home in Boston's Beacon Hill district and had two daughters, Susan, born in 1893 and Elizabeth, 1896.[4]:72-78
Alice supported her husband's resolve to devote most of his time to public causes. The Brandeis family "lived well but without extravagance."[2]:63 With the continuing success of his law practice, they later purchased a vacation cottage in Dedham where they would spend many of their weekends and summer vacations. Unexpectedly, his wife's health soon became frail, so in addition to his professional duties he found it necessary to manage the family's domestic affairs.[3]
- They shunned the more luxurious ways of their class, holding few formal dinner parties and avoiding the luxury hotels when they traveled. Brandeis would never fit the stereotype of the wealthy man. Although he belonged to a polo club, he never played polo. He owned no yacht, just a canoe that he would paddle by himself on the fast-flowing river that adjoined his cottage in Dedham.[6]:45-49 He wrote to his brother of his brief trips to Dedham: "Dedham is a spring of eternal youth for me. I feel newly made and ready to deny the existence of these gray hairs."
[edit] Career as a public advocate
In 1889, Brandeis entered a new phase in his legal career when his partner, Samuel Warren, withdrew from their partnership to take over his recently deceased father's paper company. He then took on cases with the help of colleagues, two of whom became partners in his new firm, Brandeis, Dunbar, and Nutter, in 1897.[4]:82-86
He won his first important victory in 1891, when he persuaded the Massachusetts legislature "to make the liquor laws less restrictive and...in his view, more reasonable and enforceable." In arguing his case, he managed "to devise a viable middle course." By "moderating" the existing regulations, he told the lawmakers that "they would, at a single stroke, deprive the liquor dealers of their incentive to violate the laws and to corrupt through bribery the politics of Massachusetts."[9]:34-37 The legislature was won over by his arguments and changed the regulations.
Brandeis wrote that "the law has everywhere a tendency to lag behind the facts of life." Therefore he planned, according to historian Steven Piott, to "chip away at the assumption that the principles of law should be unchanging" and "break the traditional hold on legal thinking and work to harmonize the law with the needs of the community."[14]
Part of his reasoning and philosophy for acting as a public advocate he later explained in his 1911 book, The Opportunity in the Law:
- "The counsel selected to represent important private interests possesses usually ability of a high order, while the public is often inadequately represented or wholly unrepresented. That presents a condition of great unfairness to the public. As a result, many bills pass in our legislatures which would not have become law if the public interest had been fairly represented. . . Those of you who feel drawn to that profession may rest assured that you will find in it an opportunity for usefulness probably unequaled. There is a call upon the legal profession to do a great work for this country."[10]
In one of his first such cases, in 1894, he represented Alice N. Lincoln, a Boston philanthropist and noted crusader for the poor. He appeared at public hearings to promote investigations into conditions in the public poor-houses. Lincoln, who had visited these poor-houses for years, "charged that the inmates were dwelling in misery and that the temporarily unemployed were being thrown in together callously with the mentally ill and hardened criminals."[2] Brandeis spent nine months and held fifty-seven public hearings, at one such hearing proclaiming, "Men are not bad. Men are degraded largely by circumstances....It is the duty of every man...to help them up and let them feel that there is some hope for them in life." As a result of the hearings, the board of aldermen decreed that the administration of the poor law would be completely reorganized.[9]:52-54
In 1896, he was asked to lead the fight against a Boston transit company which was trying to gain concessions from the state legislature that would have given it a "stranglehold on the city's emerging subway system." Brandeis prevailed and the legislature enacted his bill.[6]:57-61
However, the transit franchise struggle revealed that many of Boston's politicians had placed "friends" and "ward heelers" on the payrolls of the private transit companies. Lief writes that "One alderman alone had found work in this way for 200 of his followers. . . . [and] in Boston, as in other American cities, such abuses were part of a larger pattern of corruption in which graft and bribery were commonplace. Convicted felons would return from prison terms to resume their political careers.".[9]:70 "Always the moralist," writes biographer Thomas Mason, "Brandeis declared that 'misgovernment in Boston had reached the danger point.'" He announced that from then on he would keep a ledger of "good and bad deeds," making a record of Boston's politicians accessible to all the city's voters.[4] If one of his public addresses in 1903, he stated his goal:[4]:121
- We want a government that will represent the laboring man, the professional man, the businessman, and the man of leisure. We want a good government, not because it is good business but because it is dishonorable to submit to a bad government. The great name, the glory of Boston, is in our keeping.
In 1906, Brandeis won a modest victory when the state legislature enacted a measure he drafted designed to make it a punishable crime for a public official to solicit a job from a regulated public utility or for an officer of such a company to offer such favors.[4]:121
He summed up his anti-corruption philosophy in his closing argument for the Glavis-Ballinger case of 1910, describing his vision of the public servant:[15]:251
- They cannot be worthy of the respect and admiration of the people unless they add to the virtue of obedience some other virtues—the virtues of manliness, of truth, of courage, of willingness to risk positions, of the willingness to risk criticism, of the willingness to risk the misunderstanding that so often comes when people do the heroic thing.
[edit] Against monopolies
During the 1890s Brandeis began to question his views on the "industrial order in America," write Klebanow and Jonas. Becoming more aware that there was a growing number of "giant firms" which were capable of dominating whole industries, he began to lose faith that the economic system was able to regulate them for the public's welfare. As a result, he began denouncing "cut-throat competition" and fretted over the dangers of monopoly. "He became more aware of the plight of workers and more sympathetic to the labor movement."[2] His earlier legal battles had convinced him, according to Piott, "that concentrated economic power could have a negative effect on a free society."[14]:139
However, he also recognized the limits of trying to split up some monopolies. In an address in 1912, he said:
- "Understand, I am not for monopoly when we can help it. We intend to restore competition. We intend to do away with the conditions that make for monopoly. But there are certain monopolies that we cannot prevent. I understand that the steel trust is not an absolute monopoly, but if it were, what would be the use of splitting up the steel trust into companies controlled by Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, say? Would it ameliorate conditions at all? Would it make prices lower to the consumer?-the wages and the conditions higher to the worker? Don't you suppose that these three fellows would agree on prices and methods unofficially?" [16]
[edit] Against powerful corporations
As Klebanow and Jonas make clear, Brandeis was becoming increasingly conscious of and hostile to powerful corporations and the trend toward bigness in American industry and finance. As early as 1895 he had pointed out the harm that giant corporations could do to competitors, customers, and their own workers. The growth of industrialization was creating mammoth companies which he felt threatened the well-being of millions of Americans.[2]:76 Although the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was enacted in 1890, it was not until the 1900s that there was any major effort to apply it.
In fact, by 1910 Brandeis noticed that even America's leadership, including President Theodore Roosevelt, were beginning to question the value of antitrust policies. Business experts were contending that "there was nothing that could prevent to continuing concentration of industry and therefore, like it or not, big business was here to stay."[2]:76 As a result, leaders like Roosevelt saw the need to "regulate," but not limit, the growth and operation of corporate monopolies, whereas Brandeis felt the trend to bigness should be slowed, if not reversed. His experience convinced him that monopolies and trusts were "neither inevitable nor desirable." In support of Brandeis's position were presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan and Robert M. LaFollette, senator from Wisconsin.[2]
Brandeis furthermore denied that large trusts were more efficient than the smaller firms which were generally driven out of business. He argued the opposite was often true, that monopolistic enterprises became "less innovative" because, he wrote, their "secure positions freed them from the necessity which has always been the mother of invention." To him there was no way an executive could learn all the details of running a huge and unwieldy company. "There is a limit to what one man can do well," he wrote. Brandeis was naturally aware of the economies of scale and initially lower prices offered by growing companies, but he emphasized the future by claiming that once a trust drove out its competition, "the quality of its products tended to decline while the prices charged for them tended to go up." Eventually, he felt, the trusts would be like "clumsy dinosaurs, which, if they ever had to face real competition, would collapse of their own weight." In an address to the Economic Club of New York in 1912, he said:
- "We learned long ago that liberty could be preserved only by limiting in some way the freedom of action of individuals; that otherwise liberty would necessarily yield to absolutism; and in the same way we have learned that unless there be regulation of competition, its excesses will lead to the destruction of competition, and monopoly will take its place.
- "A large part of our people have also learned that efficiency in business does not grow indefinitely with the size of business. Very often, a business grows in efficiency as it grows from a small business to a large business; but there is a unit of greatest efficiency in every business, at any time, and a business may be too large to be efficient, as well as too small. Our people have also learned to understand the true reason for a large part of those huge profits which have made certain trusts conspicuous. They have learned that these profits are not due in the main to efficiency, but are due to the control of the market, to the exercise by a small body of men of the sovereign taxing power."[16]
[edit] Against mass consumerism
Among Brandeis's key themes was the conflict he saw between nineteenth-century values with its culture of the small producer, against an emerging twentieth-century age of big business and its consumerist mass society. McCraw notes that Brandeis's "hostility to the new consumerism found vivid expression in his own behavior. Though himself a millionaire, he disliked most other wealthy persons, being profoundly disturbed by their ostentatious consumption." He never shopped for his own clothes, preferring to reorder the same suits that served him well, nor did he own a yacht like his friends, but was satisfied with his canoe.
As a result, he developed a hatred of advertising and a loss of respect for the average "manipulated" consumer. He recognized that a dependence by newspapers and magazines on advertising for their revenues caused them to be "less free" than they should be. And national advertisers further undermined the relationship between consumers and local businesses. He went so far, writes McCraw, as to "urge journalists to 'teach the public' such lessons as 'to look with suspicion upon every advertised article'."
But in general, Brandeis felt that consumers were becoming "servile, self-indulgent, indolent, [and] ignorant." The consumer, he said, "had abrogated his role as a countervailing power against bigness. . . He lies not only supine, but paralyzed, and deserves to suffer like others who take their lickings 'lying down.'" He was repelled by the flaunting materialism overtaking America, often denouncing conspicuous consumption. But by doing so, notes McCraw, "he drifted imperceptibly into an attack on consumer preference, a principle that lies at the very core of a market economy."[7]:107
[edit] Becoming the "People's Lawyer"
Brandeis (center) in his Boston office, 1916
Klebanow and Jonas write that Brandeis had begun to evolve into "the people's lawyer." He was no longer accepting payment for "public interest" cases even when they required pleadings before judges, legislative committees, or administrative agencies. He also became involved in developing public opinion through writing magazine articles, making speeches, or helping form interest groups. He "insisted on serving without pay so that he would be free to address the wider issues involved rather than confine himself merely to the case at hand."[2]:66
In a 1905 address to law students and others at Harvard, he explained his philosophy:
- "The great achievement of the English-speaking people is the attainment of liberty through law. It is natural, therefore, that those who have been trained in the law should have borne an important part in that struggle for liberty and in the government which resulted . . . .
- Instead of holding a position of independence, between the wealthy and the people, prepared to curb the excesses of either, able lawyers have, to a large extent, allowed themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations and have neglected the obligation to use their powers for the protection of the people. We hear much of the 'corporation lawyer,' and far too little of the 'people's lawyer.' The great opportunity of the American Bar is and will be to stand again as it did in the past, ready to protect also the interests of the people."[17]
In 1910, a New York Times article tried to explain how someone of the stature of Brandeis would suddenly decide to become a public advocate:[18]
- Mr. Brandeis frankly admits that the thing looks queer;... Some men buy diamonds, some collect paintings and rare works of art, others delight in automobiles or swift aero racers. His hobby is to give himself the luxury of taking up a problem for the people and absolutely refusing to be compensated therefor.... In this way he expects to be able to avoid the misfortune of accumulating too great wealth and leaving to his children the handicap of having too much money. He would prefer that they should earn their way. He had the good fortune just as he was beginning to study law to be compelled by his father's financial reverses to borrow means to go on with his studies, and he has always believed it was a providential experience.
[edit] Developing new life insurance system
In March 1905, he became counsel to a New England policyholder's committee concerned that their scandal-ridden insurance company would file bankruptcy and the policyholders would lose their investments and insurance protection. He insisted on serving without pay in order to give him the freedom to address the wider issues involved. He then spent the next year studying the workings of the life insurance industry, often writing articles and giving speeches about his findings, at one point describing their practices as "legalized robbery."[6]:76-77 By 1906 he concluded that life insurance was "simply a bad bargain for the vast majority of policyholders" due mostly to the inefficiency of the industry. He also learned that the policies of "poorly paid breadwinners" were canceled when they missed a payment, due to little-understood clauses within the policy. As a result, he discovered that most policies lapsed, and only one out of eight original policyholders actually received benefits, leading to large insurance company profits.[2]
He succeeded in "creating a groundswell" in Massachusetts with his personal campaign of educating the public, and created a new "savings bank life insurance" system with the help of progressive businessmen, social reformers, and trade unionists. By March 1907, the Savings Bank Insurance League had 70,000 members and his "face and name were appearing regularly in newspapers..."[4]:164 He persuaded the former governor, a Republican, to become its president, and the current governor stated in his annual message his wish for the legislature to study plans for "cheaper insurance that may rob death of half of its terrors for the worthy poor." Brandeis drafted his own bill, and three months later the "savings bank insurance measure was signed into law." He always said this bill was one of "his greatest achievements" and, like a proud parent, he "kept a watchful eye on it." [4]:177-180
[edit] Preventing J.P. Morgan's railroad monopoly
While still involved with the life insurance industry, he took on another public interest case: the struggle to prevent New England's largest railroad company, New Haven Railroad, from gaining control of its chief competitor, the Books By This Author
