Justice Jefferson has a blind spot on race. You know, more than a blind spot. A terrible blemish on his legacy, slavery, for which he's properly excoriated. So, I think [Louis] Brandeis has done this as well.

[Louis] Brandeis is often painted as an acolyte of judicial restraint, or the view that judges should uphold laws whether or not they like them.

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 improves the prose. He simplifies it and perfects the balance of the sentence so it becomes even more memorable and aphoristic.

The historical resonances are sharp. [Louis] Brandeis is nominated on Jan. 28, 1916. Confirmed on June 1. Waits 125 days between nomination and confirmation, which remains an unbroken record, although Merrick Garland will surpass it in July, if my math is right. Anti-Semitism was definitely not the central reason for the opposition, which tended to focus more on his anti-corporate radicalism, but it was a theme.

I think he's [Louis Brandeis] a great model for progressive justices today who want to answer the originalists. It's not that the original paradigm cases are irrelevant, but you have to focus on the values the framers were trying to protect, not on the means with which those values were invaded in the 18th century.

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.