Louis D Brandeis
Once every so many a decades there comes along someone who is different. This person usually has an uncanny amount of skill in a department, or a sharp mind beyond belief. These are the people that change our society, our way of thinking, and the people that inspire us for years to come. Such a person like this is Louis d Brandeis. Born an immigrant to the US, he quickly gathered stature among the united states. With early successes in school, and awards like the excellence award from the university of public schools, to later setting the highest grade point average in Harvards history. Which did stand for 80 years. With law being his subject of choice he quickly entered a firm. It was in law where he would leave his mark forever. By the end of it he was labeled such things as what Economist magazine labeled him as “a robin hood of the law”. If he was of such great magnitude you leave not to ask yourself what made him so great and how is it still recognized today. Louis d Brandeis Had many great ideas some of which are still reverberated through our society today.
Louis d Brandeis was a man of great intellect and of extreme composure. Willing to take the blame for others in his own right. Perhaps the greatest fight he gave for the people was over free speech and our right to privacy. These two ideas were the pure genius of Brandeiss main arguments. First was his strong belief in the right to free speech. his position is best explained As he argued it in the Whitney vs. California case in (1927) “Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of free speech to free men from bondage of irrational fears Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty…” . He believed wholly in the idea of it was an undeniable right So much so that someone said “Spurred by his appreciation for democracy, education, and the value of free speech and continued to argue vigorously for…Free speech even in wartime because of its educational value and the importance of democracy” . It was his love and appreciation for the right of free speech that led him and his good friend Sam warren to write their Harvard review introducing the idea of the right to privacy. Brandeis thought that there should always be a place of solitude for man to express whatever is on his mind. He initially expressed his thoughts in the Harvard review with Samuel warren in which they stated “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