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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Whenever I felt tempted to, I don’t know, watch cat videos or bad Netflix TV instead of writing this Brandeis biography, I thought of his stern but kindly visage and buckled down and wrote the damn thing, because there’s so much information out there, and these are such anxious times in democracy, such unreasonable times.

When I was in law school I was taught that the great writers were people like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes Jr. and [Benjamin N.] Cardozo. But you go back and read their prose and it's sort of perfumed and very ornate and show-offy. And they're constantly striving for these abstractions that seem archaic nowadays.