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[Louis Brandeis] at the age of 57 decided to become the head of the American Zionist movement was more influential than anyone else in the 20th century in persuading Woodrow Wilson to recognize a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Jeffrey Rosen

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More quotes by Jeffrey Rosen

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[Louis] Brandeis is often painted as an acolyte of judicial restraint, or the view that judges should uphold laws whether or not they like them.
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For [Louis] Brandeis, it's not a technical question of channeling what would James Madison say. It's how do we take these inherent human natural rights of liberty and translate them into an age of new technolog
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Whenever I felt tempted to, I don’t know, watch cat videos or bad Netflix TV instead of writing this Brandeis biography, I thought of his stern but kindly visage and buckled down and wrote the damn thing, because there’s so much information out there, and these are such anxious times in democracy, such unreasonable times.
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Privacy is not for the passive.
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I came to believe that actually [Louis] Brandeis tended to uphold laws that he liked and strike down those that he didn't, generally strike down centralizing federal agencies in the New Deal, and uphold state economic experimentation.
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Justice Jefferson has a blind spot on race. You know, more than a blind spot. A terrible blemish on his legacy, slavery, for which he's properly excoriated. So, I think [Louis] Brandeis has done this as well.
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Louis Brandeis actually changes his mind about women's suffrage because he works with these brilliant women in the women's suffrage movement like Josephine Goldmark, his sister-in-law, where he writes a Brandeis brief which convinced the court to uphold maximum hour laws for women by collecting all these facts and empirical evidence.
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What is so inspiring about [Louis] Brandeis's writing is he saw it as a tool for democratic education. He would say things like the opinion is now convincing, now can we make it more instructive, after he'd gone through ten drafts.
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Do you think Bernie Sanders, for example, is citing Theodore Roosevelt as the progenitor of his critique of the banks when actually Roosevelt wanted to keep the banks together and regulate them.
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[Louis] Brandeis, like [Tomas] Jefferson, is an equal opportunity critic of bigness. And he, like Jefferson, sees American history as this incredible clash between small producers, farmers, and small business people on the one hand, and wicked oligarchs and financiers and monopolists on the other.
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It can sound trite if you just say citizens need to be educated for democracy to work, but for him it wasn't trite. It was really this strenuous challenge to citizens to use their moments of leisure, which he defined as time away from work, to collect the facts that were necessary for full democratic participation.
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I think even though the court is moving toward trying to translate the Constitution into a digital age, there was that wonderful unanimous decision that Chief Justice Roberts wrote saying you can't search a cellphone on arrest without a warrant.
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I think the answer has to do with the fact that [Louis D.] Brandeis was a consistent critic of bigness in business and in government.
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Louis Brandeis was not a racist like Woodrow Wilson.
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[Oliver Wendell] Holmes never believed in the truth and morality of the laws he was upholding. He said, I loathe the thick-fingered clowns we call the people.
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[Louis Brandeis] believes in natural rights of speech and liberty and the right to pursue happiness.
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The tyranny of Harvard and Yale is another thing that transcends this problem of the set point. But what's so striking about [Louis] Brandeis is he had this vision of cultural pluralism that completely gave the lie to the idea that there was any inconsistency between being Jewish or being a woman or being African American and being fully American.
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He's [Louis Brandais] so suspicious of bigness in government as well as business that he mistrusts even really top-down reforms at the state level. The most inspiring part of his legacy to me is his belief in the imperative and duty of self-education on behalf of citizens.
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But as I wrote the book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet], I tried to write it as clearly and directly and passionately as possible just thinking of communicating to readers who might want to learn about this great thinker and be inspired by him as I was.
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Louis Brandeis started off by embracing the Theodore Roosevelt notion that hyphenated Americanism was unpatriotic. You couldn't have dual loyalties. But then he thinks and he reads and he becomes the head of the American Zionist movement after having previously been a secular Jew in this amazing intellectual evolution.
Jeffrey Rosen