Conozca más sobre el perfil del famoso Juez del Supremo de EEUU, Louis Brandeis (1856-1941), en el libro, Louis D. Brendeis, a life, de Melvin I. Urofsky, reseñado ayer en el NYT. Dejo por aquí algunas partes interesantes:
"Brandeis was not shy about discussing the role law can play in shaping society. Not for him the self-effacing metaphors of recent confirmation hearings. Brandeis would have scoffed at Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. as an umpire in robes calling legal balls and strikes, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor as a law robot mechanically applying statutes and precedents to facts.
Brandeis thought the law an instrument of morality and progress. “Is not the challenge of legal justice to conform to our contemporary notions of social justice?” he asked in a speech just weeks before President Wilson nominated him to the court. It is all but impossible to imagine the nomination of a lawyer like Brandeis today, and it is a small miracle that he was confirmed even in his day.
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Take the law of privacy. In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Brandeis objected to warrantless wiretapping by the government and set down some lasting principles. “The greatest dangers to liberty,” he wrote, “lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
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Brandeis told Frankfurter that he construed the Constitution liberally where property rights were involved, meaning he seldom voted to strike down laws regulating them, but that laws restricting individual rights required closer scrutiny.
“Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards,” Brandeis wrote. “They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.”
