1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Brandeis, Louis Dembitz

BRANDEIS, LOUIS DEMBITZ (1856-      ), American lawyer and jurist, was born in Louisville, Ky., Nov. 13 1856. He was educated in the public schools of his native city and at the Annen Realschule, Dresden, Germany. He graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1877, was admitted to the bar in 1878, and practised in Boston from 1879 to 1916. As a member of the Public Franchise League he took an active part in preserving municipal control of the Boston subway. He was instrumental in securing the passage of the Boston Sliding Scale Gas Act and was a pioneer in the movement for establishing life insurance through savings banks. He opposed the monopoly of transportation by the New Haven railway in New England. He was much interested in labour legislation, acting as counsel for the people in cases involving the constitutionality of fixing hours of labour and a minimum wage in several states. In 1915 he acted successfully as counsel for the Government in the suit brought by the Riggs National Bank in which the bank charged the Secretary of the Treasury and the Comptroller of the Currency with conspiring to wreck it. In Jan. 1916 he was appointed by President Wilson to succeed the late Justice Lamar as associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, being the first Jew to attain this position. He was the author of Other People's Money and Business as a Profession, besides numerous articles on public franchise, business efficiency, labour and trusts. He was prominent in Zionism and in 1914 was made chairman of the provisional committee for Zionist affairs.