Louis Brandeis actually changes his mind about women's suffrage because he works with these brilliant women in the women's suffrage movement like Josephine Goldmark, his sister-in-law, where he writes a Brandeis brief which convinced the court to uphold maximum hour laws for women by collecting all these facts and empirical evidence.

They said, OK, nine [Louis] Brandeis's is too much, but one is OK. So, with friends like that, and so forth. But, yes, the idea that because he was Jewish he would rule a particular way was an ugly undercurrent of the hearings, which resonates with current claims that a judge can't be impartial because of his or her background or ethnicity or race. It's, I guess, a small comfort that in the end the Brandeis vote wasn't close.

It can sound trite if you just say citizens need to be educated for democracy to work, but for him it wasn't trite. It was really this strenuous challenge to citizens to use their moments of leisure, which he defined as time away from work, to collect the facts that were necessary for full democratic participation.

Louis Brandeis really inspired me to write this book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet]. It was a crazy deadline. The editor said I'd miss the hundredth anniversary unless I pumped the thing out in six months, because I'd been delaying and dilly dallying for so long. So he both inspired me to get up early and write.

[Tomas] Jefferson is more out of fashion, both because of his views on race, where he's properly questioned, that part of his legacy, but also because the libertarian critique of bigness in business and government, the idea that size is a danger is something that's shared on the right when it comes to government and on the left when it comes to corporations, but not both.

For [Louis] Brandeis, you know, ethnicity and background are much less important than facts and reason. And he believes that far from wanting to efface our diversity of perspectives, we have to embrace it because that makes us more American, not less. In that sense, he's incredibly modern in an age of cultural pluralism. And it is disappointing for just the reasons you say that not everyone has embraced his pluralistic vision.

We need to protect the same amount of cognitive liberty in an age where you can invade people's thoughts without physically intruding into their homes than you did at the time of the framing.