As America confronts a new, intensely contested Supreme Court vacancy, there is no justice who can teach us more about our current constitutional debates than Louis D. Brandeis. Brandeis waited 125 days between his nomination and his confirmation a hundred years ago on June 1, 1916, and his confirmation battle was the most contentious in Supreme Court history. Once he joined the Court, Brandeis wrote some of the most influential opinions on issues we are still grappling with today, including privacy, free speech, and excesses of corporate and federal power. He was also the first Jewish justice, the leader of the American Zionist Movement, a powerful advocate for the role of education in democracy, and a jurist whose emphasis on facts transformed the way the Court does business.

Jeffrey Rosen is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Constitution Center, the only institution in America chartered by Congress “to disseminate information about the United States Constitution on a non-partisan basis.” Rosen is also a professor at The George Washington University Law School, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a contributing editor for The Atlantic. He is a highly regarded journalist whose essays and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic, on National Public Radio, and in The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer. The Chicago Tribune named him one of the 10 best magazine journalists in America and a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times called him “the nation’s most widely read and influential legal commentator.” He received the 2012 Golden Pen Award from the Legal Writing Institute for his “extraordinary contribution to the cause of better legal writing.” Rosen is the author of The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries that Defined America; The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America; The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age; and The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. He is co-editor, with Ben Wittes, of Constitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College; Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar; and Yale Law School.

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