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 beloved uncle, Lewis Dembitz, was an ardent abolitionist. His mother was an abolitionist in Kentucky at a time when Brandeis remembered hearing the shot from the confederate soldiers after the second battle of Bull Run. Amazing to think that he heard that and I studied with one of his last law clerks in college. And that encapsulates almost all of American history.

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.

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.

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.

[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."

[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.