Latest Jeffrey Rosen Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Louis Brandeis really inspired me to write this book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet]. It was a crazy deadline. The editor said I'd miss the hundredth anniversary unless I pumped the thing out in six months, because I'd been delaying and dilly dallying for so long. So he both inspired me to get up early and write.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Crazy, Book, Writing

  Source: www.slate.com

• But as I wrote the book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet], I tried to write it as clearly and directly and passionately as possible just thinking of communicating to readers who might want to learn about this great thinker and be inspired by him as I was.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.slate.com

• Why I find Louis Brandeis so exciting and inspiring because he's teaching us - good legal writing is not a matter of taste, it's a matter of connection with fellow citizens and of democratic education.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Teaching, Writing, Connections

  Source: www.slate.com

• [Louis] Brandeis is writing directly to us. His clear voice comes through a century and he's speaking to us and he's galvanizing us and he's persuading us. And that's why I love to read the prose.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Writing, Voice, Louis Brandeis

  Source: www.slate.com

• [Louis] Brandeis improves the prose. He simplifies it and perfects the balance of the sentence so it becomes even more memorable and aphoristic.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Memorable, Balance, Louis Brandeis

  Source: www.slate.com

• What is so inspiring about [Louis] Brandeis's writing is he saw it as a tool for democratic education. He would say things like the opinion is now convincing, now can we make it more instructive, after he'd gone through ten drafts.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Writing, Saws, Tools

  Source: www.slate.com

• When I was in law school I was taught that the great writers were people like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes Jr. and [Benjamin N.] Cardozo. But you go back and read their prose and it's sort of perfumed and very ornate and show-offy. And they're constantly striving for these abstractions that seem archaic nowadays.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  School, Law, People

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

• Justice Jefferson has a blind spot on race. You know, more than a blind spot. A terrible blemish on his legacy, slavery, for which he's properly excoriated. So, I think [Louis] Brandeis has done this as well.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Thinking, Blind Spots, Race

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

• We shouldn't let the Republicans off the hook. Theodore Roosevelt, we learned from Jeff Cowan's new book, was just as bad as certainly [Louis] Brandeis was, or many Democrats were on the question of segregation.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Book, Hook, Republican

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

• It's unfortunate that [Louis] Brandeis was not able to translate or abstract his devotion to cultural pluralism and racial equality as he put it for Jews to enslave people and their descendants and to African Americans.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  People, African American, Pluralism

  Source: www.slate.com

• Louis Brandeis never had the opportunity - or he never sought the opportunity I should say - to work closely with African American lawyers. He was also a Southern Democrat, you know, at a time when both parties were supportive of segregation.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Party, Opportunity, Southern

  Source: www.slate.com

• Louis Brandeis beloved uncle, Lewis Dembitz, was an ardent abolitionist. His mother was an abolitionist in Kentucky at a time when Brandeis remembered hearing the shot from the confederate soldiers after the second battle of Bull Run. Amazing to think that he heard that and I studied with one of his last law clerks in college. And that encapsulates almost all of American history.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Running, Mother, Uncles

  Source: www.slate.com

• Louis Brandeis was not a racist like Woodrow Wilson.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Racist, Louis Brandeis, Wilson

  Source: www.slate.com

• Unlike [Woodrow] Wilson, Louis Brandeis did not support the segregation of the federal government. He was personally courteous to African Americans. He advised them and advised the head of Howard University to create a good law school. And that inspired Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall in their path-breaking work on behalf of desegregation.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  School, Law, Government

  Source: www.slate.com

• For [Louis] Brandeis, you know, ethnicity and background are much less important than facts and reason. And he believes that far from wanting to efface our diversity of perspectives, we have to embrace it because that makes us more American, not less. In that sense, he's incredibly modern in an age of cultural pluralism. And it is disappointing for just the reasons you say that not everyone has embraced his pluralistic vision.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Believe, Ethnicity, Diversity

  Source: www.slate.com

• Louis Brandeis actually changes his mind about women's suffrage because he works with these brilliant women in the women's suffrage movement like Josephine Goldmark, his sister-in-law, where he writes a Brandeis brief which convinced the court to uphold maximum hour laws for women by collecting all these facts and empirical evidence.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Writing, Sister In Law, Mind

  Source: www.slate.com

• And he [Louis Brandeis] talks to his young acolyte, Horace Kallen, who wrote this beautiful book called Cultural Pluralism, and he comes to believe that by being better Jews, or better members of our ethnic group, we can be better Americans, because America is like an orchestra in which identity is defined by the diversity of perspectives that we bring to the table.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Beautiful, Believe, Book

  Source: www.slate.com

• The tyranny of Harvard and Yale is another thing that transcends this problem of the set point. But what's so striking about [Louis] Brandeis is he had this vision of cultural pluralism that completely gave the lie to the idea that there was any inconsistency between being Jewish or being a woman or being African American and being fully American.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Lying, Yale, Ideas

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

• Louis Brandeis started off by embracing the Theodore Roosevelt notion that hyphenated Americanism was unpatriotic. You couldn't have dual loyalties. But then he thinks and he reads and he becomes the head of the American Zionist movement after having previously been a secular Jew in this amazing intellectual evolution.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Loyalty, Thinking, Intellectual

  Source: www.slate.com

• They said, OK, nine [Louis] Brandeis's is too much, but one is OK. So, with friends like that, and so forth. But, yes, the idea that because he was Jewish he would rule a particular way was an ugly undercurrent of the hearings, which resonates with current claims that a judge can't be impartial because of his or her background or ethnicity or race. It's, I guess, a small comfort that in the end the Brandeis vote wasn't close.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Ideas, Race, Ethnicity

  Source: www.slate.com

• William Howard Taft, who he embarrassed in these congressional hearings, attacks him as an emotionalist and a socialist and a cosmopolitan in terms that kind of have an anti-Semitic overtone. And even the pro-Brandeis press supported him in terms that really seem creepy today. There's this piece from Life magazine. It says, "Mr. Brandeis is a Jew. And until now there's never been a Jew on the Supreme Court. Perhaps it's time we have one."

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Creepy, Pieces, Magazines

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

• The historical resonances are sharp. [Louis] Brandeis is nominated on Jan. 28, 1916. Confirmed on June 1. Waits 125 days between nomination and confirmation, which remains an unbroken record, although Merrick Garland will surpass it in July, if my math is right. Anti-Semitism was definitely not the central reason for the opposition, which tended to focus more on his anti-corporate radicalism, but it was a theme.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Math, June, July

  Source: www.slate.com

• Initially the papers said that the fact that Louis Brandeis was picked because he was Jewish. The New York Sun said he's the first Jew ever picked for the bench - a long and bitter fight expected in the Senate over confirmation.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  New York, Fighting, Long

  Source: www.slate.com

• I think he's [Louis Brandeis] a great model for progressive justices today who want to answer the originalists. It's not that the original paradigm cases are irrelevant, but you have to focus on the values the framers were trying to protect, not on the means with which those values were invaded in the 18th century.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Mean, Thinking, Justice

  Source: www.slate.com

• He [Louis Brandeis] would have not had any patience with that great debate which you're right to kind of signal between Justice Scalia and Justice Alito about do you need a physical trespass into the home or onto the carriage in order to trigger the values of the Fourth Amendment.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Home, Order, Justice

  Source: www.slate.com