Source: https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1316/louis-brandeis
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 08:07:57+00:00

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Louis Dembitz Brandeis (1856–1941) was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Bohemia after 1848. At age 18, Louis Brandeis enrolled in Harvard Law School, graduating first in his class in 1877. Working as a lawyer in Boston, he became known as the “people’s attorney” for his involvement in social justice movements and representation of workers’ interests. His advocacy in Muller v. Oregon (1908) included the “Brandeis Brief,” in which he employed extensive empirical data to make the case for restricting the hours of labor for women. Appointed by President Woodrow Wilson to the Supreme Court in 1916, Brandeis became the first Jewish member of the Court and served as an associate justice until 1939.
During Brandeis’s tenure, the Court heard a number of important First Amendment cases and began the process of applying the provisions of this amendment to the states as well as to the national government. Brandeis’s stance evolved on issues of free speech from one that upheld governmental restrictions on expression to his concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927), which laid out an elegant argument on the virtues of freedom of speech.
Shortly after the United States entered World War I in 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which criminalized the willful obstruction of the military draft, actions causing “insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty,” and false statements about the armed forces. The law was amended via the Sedition Act of 1918 to include very broad language that, in effect, outlawed statements criticizing the U.S. government.
Although this sedition act was repealed in 1921, the Supreme Court heard a number of cases that fell under its provisions. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote opinions for the Court in three 1919 cases — Schenck v. United States, Frohwerk v. United States, and Debs v. United States — in which the justices, including Brandeis, unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the Espionage Act. According to Holmes, Congress had the authority to limit political speech to protect against a “clear and present danger.” The Court found that during wartime words — in Schenck’s case a pamphlet urging resistance to the draft — were dangerous and therefore not protected speech. Even if the words did not lead to acts that harmed the United States, the speakers or writers could be penalized for the dangers that their words posed.
Later that year, in Abrams v. United States (1919), however, Holmes and Brandeis joined in a dissent that reinterpreted the “clear and present danger” standard that Holmes had articulated in Schenck. Jacob Abrams and his colleagues had written and distributed leaflets criticizing President Wilson for sending American troops to fight in Russia.
During the 1920s Brandeis defended the First Amendment against what he saw as attempts to stifle free expression, and he shared his ideas on the crucial nature of free expression in a democracy. He believed that repression would not defeat radicalism; rather, unorthodox groups should be encouraged to enter into the market competition of the political arena. In his dissent in Schaefer v. United States (1920), he stressed that the appropriate response to fiery rhetoric is not censure but calmness. In Pierce v. United States (1920), Brandeis again dissented, arguing that a wide definition of free speech is necessary in a pluralistic political system.
In the years after World War I, a wave of anti-Bolshevik hysteria swept the United States, based on a fear, intensified by occasional bombings and other acts of violence, that the Russian Revolution and its radical ideology would spread around the world. Across the country, states outlawed activities perceived as radical; a majority banned the display of red flags, while some state and local officials were granted the power to silence controversial groups and opinions. It was in such a case, Whitney v. California, that Brandeis wrote his most influential and expansive statement on the subject of freedom of speech. Some scholars have suggested that this concurring opinion provided the theoretical framework for future Courts’ First Amendment jurisprudence.
Brandeis voted with the majority to uphold Charlotte Anita Whitney’s conviction, on non–First Amendment grounds, for violating California’s Criminal Syndicalism Act by belonging to the Communist Party. In his concurring opinion, joined by Holmes, Brandeis addressed free speech issues at length.
In 1931 the majority of the Court accepted Brandeis’s position on free speech in Stromberg v. California (1931). Yetta Stromberg, who worked at a summer camp sponsored by the Young Communist League, had been arrested for leading young campers in a daily ritual where they saluted a red flag.
Seven justices signed on to an opinion by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes that echoed the ideas in Brandeis’s Whitney concurrence. They ruled that free political discussion was “essential to the security of the Republic” and a “fundamental principle in our constitutional system.” Brandeis stayed on the Court long enough to see it also adopt the deferential posture toward governmental economic regulation that he had long advocated. He died in 1941, two years after retiring. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed William O. Douglas to replace him.
Bhagwat, Ashutosh A. “The Story of Whitney v. California: The Power of Ideas.” In Constitutional Law Stories, edited by Michael Dorf. New York: Foundation Press, 2004.
Mason, Alpheus Thomas. Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life. New York: Viking Press, 1946.
Sturm, Phillipa. Louis Brandeis: Beyond Progressivism. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993.
Blasi, Vincent. "The First Amendment and the Ideal of Civic Courage: The Brandeis Opinion in Whitney v. California." William and Mary Law Review 29 (1988): 653-697.
Brandeis, Louis D. and Samuel D. Warren. "The Right to Privacy." Harvard Law Review 4 (1890): 193-220.

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