To be sure, an editor keen to ensure that those who began the book finished it could have trimmed a goodly number of pages without sacrificing much. Yet Urofsky’s book is something of a page turner.

Such is the scope and detail of Urofsky’s project-and of Brandeis’s activities that remain of interest today-that not until page 460 does the book’s hero sit on the high court, in 1916, at the age of 59. Brandeis (1856–1941) was a man of uncommon diversity, so to read about the fullness of his life requires not merely an interest in Supreme Court history but in Progressive Era politics, antitrust policy, Zionism, railroads, turn-of-the-century labor-management disputes, savings bank life insurance (a particular passion), the Woodrow Wilson administration, and countless reform projects in which Brandeis played a major role. Merely to describe its contents will no doubt have many prospective readers running for the exits. Supreme Court’s titanic figures is a doorstop. In this award-winning biography, Melvin Urofsky gives us a panoramic view of Brandeis's unprecedented impact on American society and law.At more than 900 pages, Melvin Urofsky’s biography of one of the U.S. During the brutal six-month congressional confirmation battle that ensued when Woodrow Wilson nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1916, Brandeis was described as 'a disturbing element in any gentlemen's club.' But once on the Court, he became one of its most influential members, developing the modern jurisprudence of free speech and the doctrine of a constitutionally protected right to privacy and suggesting what became known as the doctrine of incorporation, by which the Bill of Rights came to apply to the states. Brandeis invented savings bank life insurance in Massachusetts and was a driving force in the development of the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Reserve Act, and the law establishing the Federal Trade Commission.īrandeis witnessed and suffered from the anti-Semitism rampant in the United States in the early twentieth century, and with the outbreak of World War I, became at age fifty-eight the head of the American Zionist movement. He was an early champion of the right to privacy and pioneer the idea of pro bono work by attorneys. As a young lawyer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Louis Brandeis, born into a family of reformers who came to the United States to escape European anti-Semitism, established the way modern law is practiced.

Louis D. Brandeis by Melvin I. Urofsky