ABSTRACT
Louis D. Brandeis was an innovator in the law who articulated the basis for the US Constitution's protection of privacy and speech. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Brandeis enrolled at Harvard Law School at age eighteen. Shortly after graduating from Harvard in 1878, he and classmate Samuel D. Warren Jr. opened a law partnership in Boston. Responding to his new role as an attorney for small businessmen, Brandeis developed an original conception of the role of both the lawyer and the law. When Brandeis was asked to defend Oregon's maximum-hours law for women before a skeptical US Supreme Court, he submitted a brief that contained only two pages of legal precedents but more than 100 pages of factual support for his argument that society would benefit from that kind of protection for women workers. The fact-filled "Brandeis brief" became the model for American constitutional litigation.
