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.

[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."

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."

That strain of anti-monopoly crusading egalitarianism really runs throughout American history from [Tomas] Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, that finds its apotheosis in [Louis] Brandeis, continues through the New Deal, but then it sort of peters out in the '60s because progressives in particular become more interested in extending equality to minorities, and women, and other excluded groups, and little more suspicious of these old white guys, often from the south, who were crusaders against monopolies.

Do you think Bernie Sanders, for example, is citing Theodore Roosevelt as the progenitor of his critique of the banks when actually Roosevelt wanted to keep the banks together and regulate them.

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.

[Louis Brandeis] at the age of 57 decided to become the head of the American Zionist movement was more influential than anyone else in the 20th century in persuading Woodrow Wilson to recognize a Jewish homeland in Palestine.