Louis Brandeis - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

Brandeis retired from the Supreme Court in February 1939, and he died on October 5, 1941, following a heart attack.

The remains of both Justice Brandeis and his wife are interred beneath the portico of the Law School of the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. Brandeis himself made the arrangements that made the law school one of only thirteen Supreme Court repositories in the U.S. His professional papers are archived at the library there.

Brandeis lived to see many of the ideas that he had championed become the law of the land. Wages and hours legislation were now accepted as constitutional, and the right of labor to organize was protected by law. His spirited, eloquent defense of free speech and the right of privacy have had a continuing, powerful influence upon the Supreme Court and, ultimately, upon the life of the entire nation. The Economist magazine calls him "A Robin Hood of the law," and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, his early law clerk, was "impressed by a man whose personal code called for . . . the zealous molding of the lives of the underprivileged so that paupers might achieve moral growth."

Wayne McIntosh writes of him, "In our national juristic temple, some figures have been accorded near-Olympian reverence. . . a part of that legal pantheon is Louis D. Brandeis – all the more so, perhaps because Brandeis was far more than a great justice. He was also a social reformer, legal innovator, labor champion, and Zionist leader. . . And it was as a judge that his concepts of privacy and free speech ultimately, if posthumously, resulted in virtual legal sea changes that continue to resonate even today.” Former Justice William O. Douglas wrote, “he helped America grow to greatness by the dedications of which he made his life."

The U.S. Postal Service in September 2009 honored Brandeis by featuring his image on a new set of commemorative stamps along with U.S. Supreme Court associate justices Joseph Story, Felix Frankfurter and William J. Brennan Jr. In the Postal Service announcement about the stamp, he was credited with being "the associate justice most responsible for helping the Supreme Court shape the tools it needed to interpret the Constitution in light of the sociological and economic conditions of the 20th century." The Postal Service honored him with a stamp image in part because, their announcement states, he was "a progressive and champion of reform, Brandeis devoted his life to social justice. He defended the right of every citizen to speak freely, and his groundbreaking conception of the right to privacy continues to impact legal thought today."