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.

I'd say that [Louis] Brandeis practiced a kind of a "living originalism," to use the title of Jack Balkin's great book. He said you start with the paradigm case, which in the case of the Fourth Amendment was these general warrants or writs of assistance, but you define it at a level of abstraction that you can take it into our age and make it our own.

He [Louis Brandais] did believe in the states famously as laboratories of democracy, to use that resonant phrase that Tea Party and conservative libertarians have embraced today because he loves state experimentation.

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.

William Howard Taft, who he embarrassed in these congressional hearings, attacks him as an emotionalist and a socialist and a cosmopolitan in terms that kind of have an anti-Semitic overtone. And even the pro-Brandeis press supported him in terms that really seem creepy today. There's this piece from Life magazine. It says, "Mr. Brandeis is a Jew. And until now there's never been a Jew on the Supreme Court. Perhaps it's time we have one."

[Louis Brandeis] believes in natural rights of speech and liberty and the right to pursue happiness.

[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."