ABSTRACT
Louis Dembitz Brandeis was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on November 13, 1856, the youngest of the four children, two boys and two girls, born to Adolph and Frederika Brandeis. Both parents were Jews of Germanic culture who had grown up in Prague, the principal city of Bohemia. By the 1850s, the nationwide clash over the future of slavery was intensifying and the Brandeises’ adopted state of Kentucky was one of its many battle grounds. Louis’s formal education began at six at a small private school. Later, he moved to the German and English Academy of Louisville where he attended for six years, impressing his teachers with his brilliance and diligence. In 1875, Brandeis was admitted to Harvard Law School, which was in the midst of the academic revolution begun by Dean C. B. Langdell, the pioneer of the “case method” in legal education, in which students, instead of memorizing textbooks, would examine individual cases, studying for themselves the actual court records.
