We shouldn't let the Republicans off the hook. Theodore Roosevelt, we learned from Jeff Cowan's new book, was just as bad as certainly [Louis] Brandeis was, or many Democrats were on the question of segregation.

I was very much influenced by a great book by the scholar Neil Richards called Intellectual Privacy, that [Louis] Brandeis changed his mind on the proper balance between dignity and free speech.

Louis Brandeis was not a racist like Woodrow Wilson.

[Louis] Brandeis is writing directly to us. His clear voice comes through a century and he's speaking to us and he's galvanizing us and he's persuading us. And that's why I love to read the prose.

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.

Louis Brandeis never had the opportunity - or he never sought the opportunity I should say - to work closely with African American lawyers. He was also a Southern Democrat, you know, at a time when both parties were supportive of segregation.

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.