Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet
Jeffrey Rosen, Yale University Press, 242 pages, $25. Louis Brandeis geared up for combat when J.P. Morgan's New Haven Railroad tried to buy the Boston and Maine lines. Morgan prevailed, but Brandeis would win many other battles on behalf of his people: consumers, workers, small-businessmen and other common folk. He rode his success as "the people's lawyer" into President Woodrow Wilson's inner circle as an influential economic adviser, and then onto the Supreme Court, where he was the first Jewish justice and a progressive champion. Jeffrey Rosen's excellent book is not a full biography — that ground is already well-trod — but rather a concise and sympathetic exploration of Brandeis' main intellectual causes. At first, Brandeis represented corporations, but he soon took on the plight of workers. He won a major victory in 1908, in Muller vs. Oregon, when he persuaded a pro-business Supreme Court to uphold a maximum-hours law for women. Brandeis' concerns about big corporations went beyond their labor practices: He saw them as antithetical to America's democratic ideals. In his view, it was the size of these corporations that was the problem. Brandeis' prescription was aggressive trustbusting, and his work for President Wilson helped clear the way for the landmark Clayton Antitrust Act. Because of his deep distrust of big government, Brandeis was not always a reliable progressive vote on the court, and not all of his decisions have stood the test of time. But despite Brandeis' occasional misfires, his philosophies, Rosen convincingly argues, speak powerfully to our times.
NEW YORK TIMES
