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.

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

What is so inspiring about [Louis] Brandeis's writing is he saw it as a tool for democratic education. He would say things like the opinion is now convincing, now can we make it more instructive, after he'd gone through ten drafts.

I think even though the court is moving toward trying to translate the Constitution into a digital age, there was that wonderful unanimous decision that Chief Justice Roberts wrote saying you can't search a cellphone on arrest without a warrant.

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.

Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.

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.