page_title: Louis Brandeis
section_title: Personal life and marriage
hierarchical_section_title: Louis Brandeis / Personal life and marriage
caption_attribution_description: Louis Brandeis in his canoe
context_page_description: Louis Dembitz Brandeis was an American lawyer and associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish immigrant parents from Bohemia, who raised him in a secular home. He attended Harvard Law School, graduating at the age of 20 with what is widely rumored to be the highest grade average in the law school's history. Brandeis settled in Boston, where he founded a law firm and became a recognized lawyer through his work on progressive social causes.
  Starting in 1890, he helped develop the "right to privacy" concept by writing a Harvard Law Review article of that title, and was thereby credited by legal scholar Roscoe Pound as having accomplished "nothing less than adding a chapter to our law". He later published a book entitled Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It, suggesting ways of curbing the power of large banks and money trusts. He fought against powerful corporations, monopolies, public corruption, and mass consumerism, all of which he felt were detrimental to American values and culture.
context_section_description: In 1890, Brandeis became engaged to his second cousin Alice Goldmark, of New York. He was then 34 years of age and had previously found little time for courtship. Alice was the daughter of Joseph Goldmark, a physician who had immigrated to America from Austria-Hungary after the collapse of the Revolution of 1848. They were married on March 23, 1891, at the home of her parents in New York City in a civil ceremony. The newlywed couple moved into a modest home in Boston's Beacon Hill district and had two daughters, Susan Brandeis Gilbert, born in 1893, and Elizabeth Brandeis Rauschenbush, born in 1896.
  Alice supported her husband's resolve to devote most of his time to public causes. The Brandeis family "lived well but without extravagance." With the continuing success of his law practice, they later purchased a vacation house in Dedham, where they would spend many of their weekends and summer vacations. Unexpectedly, his wife's health soon became frail, and so in addition to his professional duties, he found it necessary to manage the family's domestic affairs.
  They shunned the more luxurious ways of their class, holding few formal dinner parties and avoiding the luxury hotels when they traveled. Brandeis would never fit the stereotype of the wealthy man. Although he belonged to a polo club, he never played polo. He owned no yacht, just a canoe that he would paddle by himself on the fast-flowing river that adjoined his cottage in Dedham. He wrote to his brother of his brief trips to Dedham: "Dedham is a spring of eternal youth for me. I feel newly made and ready to deny the existence of these gray hairs.
caption: Brandeis in his canoe, circa 1916
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