PREFACE

THE IDEALISTIC PRAGMATIST

In 1920 theHarvard Law School professor Manley Hudson journeyed to Washington, and while there paid a visit on Justice Louis D. Brandeis and his law clerk, Dean Acheson. As he usually did, Brandeis quizzed his guest about recent events at the law school and also about Hudson's role as a legal adviser to the League of Nations. While discussing his work, Hudson alluded to international law as conditional, with principles varying depending upon the situation and the nations involved. He had barely finished when, to his great surprise and alarm, Brandeis stood up and began, as Acheson described it, to thunder like an Old Testament prophet. Principles are fixed and immutable, Brandeis declared, because without reliance on established values democratic society and individual freedom are impossible. He quoted Goethe and Euripides, and on it went, a frightening display of elemental force.

The incident is indicative of a key aspect of Louis Brandeis's nature— his idealism. He once told his niece that "ideals are everything." His attraction to the law derived in part from his belief that law provided the ideal means by which free men could impose order on their behavior and at the same time allow the greatest liberty for each person. He said many times that he had joined the Zionist movement because of its idealistic nature. For Brandeis, above all things the individual mattered, and the best society allowed each person, through hard work, to achieve all that his or her talents deserved. He did not believe in the mass salvation of "isms"; the world would be made better one person at a time. The good life rested on the dignity and independence of the individual, who cou...