If it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly takes an academic village to bring a book into existence, and my debts to various teachers, fellow scholars, members of the Brandeis family, former law clerks, librarians, research assistants, and funding agencies extend over four decades.
My greatest debt is to David W. Levy, now emeritus professor at the University of Oklahoma. Many years ago David and I ventured forth on a project to edit the Louis Brandeis Letters, and we have remained friends and colleagues for more than four decades. I would not think of publishing anything on Brandeis without David’s looking at it, and his meticulous reading and unerring eye not only saved me from error, but helped me to refine my ideas.
Jill Norgren of the City University of New York also read the entire manuscript, and her acute questions assisted me in making parts clearer both to myself and, I hope, to the readers as well. Robert Post of the Yale Law School, William Wiecek of Syracuse Law, Jonathan Lurie of Rutgers, and Nancy Woloch of Barnard College all read various chapters, and I am grateful for their comments.
Several members of the Brandeis family patiently answered questions, and I want to thank Alice Brandeis Popkin, Frank Brandeis Gilbert, and Walter Raushenbush, the Justice’s surviving grandchildren, as well as two members of Alfred’s family, Charles Tachau and David Tachau. And although they are gone, David’s parents, Eric and Mary K. Tachau, were dear friends and a great help to David Levy and me when we were working on the Letters.
My two sons, Philip and Robert, served as research assistants at various stages of the Letters, and their labors proved equally valuable for this volume. In addition, Arielle Kristan, Jessica Milling, Joshua Perelman, and Bonnie Speck worked on different chores.
Lewis J. Paper and Philippa Strum have written extensively on Brandeis, and although they did not read this manuscript I owe them a great deal. Lew graciously opened his papers, now at the Harvard Law School, so I could use his interviews with former Brandeis law clerks. Philippa and I over the years spent many hours discussing Brandeis, and I have profited greatly from her ideas. Barbara Sicherman came to my rescue with information on women’s health in the nineteenth century in order to understand Alice Brandeis’s illness, while Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University answered questions on American Jewish history. Tanya Harvey of the Washington office of Bryan Cave, LLP, went over Brandeis’s will with me and helped clear up some long-standing misconceptions about its provisions.
This work utilized materials from literally dozens of libraries and hundreds of manuscript collections, and I could not have done that work without the help of the dedicated librarians and archivists who not only guard and preserve their treasures but make them available to researchers. At the Library of Congress, which is truly one of the world’s great scholarly repositories, the staffs of the Manuscript Division, the Law Library, and the Prints and Photographs Division made my time there not only productive but pleasant. Scott Campbell and Kurt X. Metzmeier at the Brandeis Law School Library of the University of Louisville, Gary Zola of the American Jewish Archives, and David Warrington of the Harvard Law School Library are all old friends, and they went out of their way to make my time at their institutions a joy.
In addition, the following helped me locate books, documents, pictures, and all the other items one needs for research and writing: Karen Abramson and Sarah Shoemaker of Special Collections at Brandeis University; Melinda Spitzer Johnson and Margaret Peachy of the Harvard Law School Library; Robin L. Wallace of the Filson Club in Louisville; Susan Woodland of the Hadassah Archives; Erika Gottfried of the Tamiment Institute; Barbara Ward Grubb of the Bryn Mawr Library; Lyn Slome of the American Jewish Historical Society; Mary Marshall Clark, the director of the Columbia University Oral History Research Office; and a special thanks to Steve Petteway, the curator of the photograph collection at the U.S. Supreme Court, and his assistant, Lauren Morrell. Much of the research material I collected for the Letters has been deposited in the Special Collections Department of the State University of New York at Albany, and its head, Brian Keough, made it possible for me to use this material at home, a luxury for which I am very grateful.
I have been very fortunate in the generous financial support given to this project. Ambassador John L. Loeb Jr. made three separate foundation grants to cover research expenses, and I am grateful not only for the funds but for his encouragement and friendship. The National Endowment for the Humanities was the primary funder for the Brandeis Letters, and I greatly appreciate their awarding me a Senior Research Fellowship under the “We the People” initiative. Additional funding came from Virginia Commonwealth University, and I want to thank the former dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences, Robert D. Holsworth, for his support of this project. David Pride and Kathleen Shurtleff of the Supreme Court Historical Society oversaw the administration of grant funds and also helped me in numerous other ways.
The Rockefeller Foundation awarded me a fellowship to spend a month at the study center it operates in Bellagio, Italy. I and all the other fellows consider the Villa Serbelloni to be what heaven must be like for scholars. There I had a chance to work on revising the manuscript and benefiting from the views of the other scholars and artists in residence. The wonderful atmosphere and support is due to Pilar Palaciá, the managing director, and Elena Ongania, the residents’ assistant, who kept us fed well and made sure the Xerox and the computers worked.
My agent and friend, Loretta Barrett, encouraged this project from the start and hooked me up with one of the smartest editors I have known, Vicky Wilson. She and her staff at Pantheon—Carmen Johnson, Iris Weinstein, and Jonathan Sainsbury—transformed an unwieldy manuscript into the book you hold in your hand. Other writers will understand when I say that I would gladly have Ingrid Sterner copyedit any future books I write.
While all these people have given me great assistance, any errors and defects remaining in this book are, I am afraid, mine alone.
Finally, this book is dedicated to my wife, who has endured having Louis Brandeis live with us for so many years. My love and gratitude for her putting up with me (and with Louis) all these decades are boundless.