Brandeis, Louis D.

Louis D. Brandeis (1856–1941), who served as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939, was an attorney who achieved fame fighting as the “People’s Lawyer” and as a Robin Hood of the law to curb the power of large banks and trusts and to prevent monopolies in business. A brilliant graduate of Harvard Law School, he joined his law school friend Samuel Warren in founding a law firm in Boston. With Warren, he penned the influential article “The Right to Privacy,” published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, which argued that political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and that one of these rights was “the right to be let alone.”

He also articulated his criticism of ...