[Louis] Brandeis had a very distinctive vision of political economy that he persuaded Woodrow Wilson to adopt in the 1912 election and that he largely enacted from the bench.

Why I find Louis Brandeis so exciting and inspiring because he's teaching us - good legal writing is not a matter of taste, it's a matter of connection with fellow citizens and of democratic education.

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.

It's unfortunate that [Louis] Brandeis was not able to translate or abstract his devotion to cultural pluralism and racial equality as he put it for Jews to enslave people and their descendants and to African Americans.

And he [Louis Brandeis] talks to his young acolyte, Horace Kallen, who wrote this beautiful book called Cultural Pluralism, and he comes to believe that by being better Jews, or better members of our ethnic group, we can be better Americans, because America is like an orchestra in which identity is defined by the diversity of perspectives that we bring to the table.

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.

[Louis Brandeis] insisted on the necessity of public reason, which he thought could only be achieved if all of us just take the time to inform ourselves about the best arguments on all sides of questions so that we can make up our own minds.