Louis Brandeis - Career As A Public Advocate

Career As A Public Advocate

In 1889, Brandeis entered a new phase in his legal career when his partner, Samuel Warren, withdrew from their partnership to take over his recently deceased father's paper company. He then took on cases with the help of colleagues, two of whom became partners in his new firm, Brandeis, Dunbar, and Nutter, in 1897.

He won his first important victory in 1891, when he persuaded the Massachusetts legislature "to make the liquor laws less restrictive and...in his view, more reasonable and enforceable." In arguing his case, he managed "to devise a viable middle course." By "moderating" the existing regulations, he told the lawmakers that "they would, at a single stroke, deprive the liquor dealers of their incentive to violate the laws and to corrupt through bribery the politics of Massachusetts." The legislature was won over by his arguments and changed the regulations.

Brandeis wrote that "the law has everywhere a tendency to lag behind the facts of life." Therefore he planned, according to historian Steven Piott, to "chip away at the assumption that the principles of law should be unchanging" and "break the traditional hold on legal thinking and work to harmonize the law with the needs of the community."

Part of his reasoning and philosophy for acting as a public advocate he later explained in his 1911 book, The Opportunity in the Law:

"The counsel selected to represent important private interests possesses usually ability of a high order, while the public is often inadequately represented or wholly unrepresented. That presents a condition of great unfairness to the public. As a result, many bills pass in our legislatures which would not have become law if the public interest had been fairly represented. . . Those of you who feel drawn to that profession may rest assured that you will find in it an opportunity for usefulness probably unequaled. There is a call upon the legal profession to do a great work for this country."

In one of his first such cases, in 1894, he represented Alice N. Lincoln, a Boston philanthropist and noted crusader for the poor. He appeared at public hearings to promote investigations into conditions in the public poor-houses. Lincoln, who had visited these poor-houses for years, "charged that the inmates were dwelling in misery and that the temporarily unemployed were being thrown in together callously with the mentally ill and hardened criminals." Brandeis spent nine months and held fifty-seven public hearings, at one such hearing proclaiming, "Men are not bad. Men are degraded largely by circumstances....It is the duty of every man...to help them up and let them feel that there is some hope for them in life." As a result of the hearings, the board of aldermen decreed that the administration of the poor law would be completely reorganized.

In 1896, he was asked to lead the fight against a Boston transit company which was trying to gain concessions from the state legislature that would have given it a "stranglehold on the city's emerging subway system." Brandeis prevailed and the legislature enacted his bill.

However, the transit franchise struggle revealed that many of Boston's politicians had placed "friends" and "ward heelers" on the payrolls of the private transit companies. Lief writes that "One alderman alone had found work in this way for 200 of his followers. . . . in Boston, as in other American cities, such abuses were part of a larger pattern of corruption in which graft and bribery were commonplace. Convicted felons would return from prison terms to resume their political careers.". "Always the moralist," writes biographer Thomas Mason, "Brandeis declared that 'misgovernment in Boston had reached the danger point.'" He announced that from then on he would keep a ledger of "good and bad deeds," making a record of Boston's politicians accessible to all the city's voters. If one of his public addresses in 1903, he stated his goal:

We want a government that will represent the laboring man, the professional man, the businessman, and the man of leisure. We want a good government, not because it is good business but because it is dishonorable to submit to a bad government. The great name, the glory of Boston, is in our keeping.

In 1906, Brandeis won a modest victory when the state legislature enacted a measure he drafted designed to make it a punishable crime for a public official to solicit a job from a regulated public utility or for an officer of such a company to offer such favors.

He summed up his anti-corruption philosophy in his closing argument for the Glavis-Ballinger case of 1910, describing his vision of the public servant:

They cannot be worthy of the respect and admiration of the people unless they add to the virtue of obedience some other virtues—the virtues of manliness, of truth, of courage, of willingness to risk positions, of the willingness to risk criticism, of the willingness to risk the misunderstanding that so often comes when people do the heroic thing.