This is a review of Louis D Brandeis: A Life by Melvin Urofsky. The author has written a detailed account of one of the most eminent lawyers and judges of our country, Brandeis. Brandeis was a brilliant and perceptive jurist and he was part of what is now the bases of many of what we accept as common "rights" as citizens of the United States.
The biography is long and detailed and is probably one of the best biographies on Brandeis that I have read. Rather than detail the book I want to use two episodes in Brandeis life as discussed in the book to make a few points.
First, the issue of the right to privacy. On pp 99-102 the author describes the seminal paper by Warren and Brandeis entitled "The Right to Privacy" which as the author does state is in many ways a right to be left alone, a right to anonymity. The fact is that there is no such right in the Constitution and that Warren and Brandeis, truly Brandeis alone if one understands the author, develops such "right" from well established common law principles. This was a brilliant paper and in many ways is as important today and it was over a hundred years ago. It would have been interesting for the author to detail this paper a bit more. The author returns to this topic of privacy in the discussion of the Olmstead case on pp 628-632. This was the first wiretapping case where the Court ruled that there was no need for a warrant and thus no 4th Amendment protection. Brandeis' writing on his dissent is quite telling and it should have gotten a bit more coverage by the author. Brandeis states in his dissent:
"Of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers, from the inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all others would lose half their value."
To me this needs a substantially longer discussion but the author does do it some credit.
The second issue is the relationship between Brandeis and Taylor and Galbreth, both early 20th century management consultants. There is a recent article in The New Yorker by Jill Lepore, a superb piece of critical and historical analysis of Brandeis, which discusses this relationship in detail and presents many of the weaknesses in Brandeis. Lepore looks at Brandeis through the lens of the management and efficiency consultants, in may ways the hucksters who predated the current Business Schools. She starts her article by stating:
"Ordering people around, which used to be just a way to get things done, was elevated to a science in October of 1910, when Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from Boston, held a meeting at an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts who, at Brandeis's urging, decided to call what they were experts at "scientific management." Everyone there--including Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, best known today as the parents in "Cheaper by the Dozen"--had contracted "Tayloritis": they were enthralled by an industrial engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had been ordering people around, scientifically, for years."
The essence of the tale is that Brandeis, who at the time was sitting on a regulatory body which controlled the monopoly like rates of railroadsm had gotten enthralled with the less than scientific work of Taylor and the Gilbreths. He then saw that railroads should employ these new management techniques and then lower their rates. Simple, except as Lepore states, the Taylor results were a fraud! Perhaps there is a lesson here for many other "scientifically" based causes seeking legal justification. Brandeis was a brilliant legal scholar, however he had no expertise in the area of actually running a company. He did however understand the "books" and "records" of a company and as such he had used this profitably in his law practice. Yet the Taylor approach assumed you looked forward and not backward, that you understood the business as a living entity and not just the records of what happened. Brandeis was a lawyer at heart, as such he always looked backwards for precedent.
The author of the present biography gives, in my opinion, short shrift to this issue discussed by Lepore. He covers it on pp 240-243 but his discussion misses the key point presented by Lepore. Namely that Brandies became enamored with Taylor and Galbreth and that Taylor according to Lepore was somewhat of a fraud, the Taylor data it is alleged was all fabricated, and Galbreth had little if any basis for his facts and recommendations.
The author has done a superb job at writing the biography. Yet it does have in my opinion certain weaknesses. In certain parts of the text the sentences are wonderful but the paragraphs do not hold together, there is jumping around in time and in concepts being discussed. In contrast, the Lepore article has a style that is quite readable, whereas that of Urofsky is at times cumbersome and pedantic. As stated in my discussion of privacy and "management", Brandeis set the gold standard for privacy and I believe Urofsky could have taken that further, and with Taylor and Galbreth, I believe Brandeis just did not do his home work, and this was a failing.
The biography is long and detailed and is probably one of the best biographies on Brandeis that I have read. Rather than detail the book I want to use two episodes in Brandeis life as discussed in the book to make a few points.
First, the issue of the right to privacy. On pp 99-102 the author describes the seminal paper by Warren and Brandeis entitled "The Right to Privacy" which as the author does state is in many ways a right to be left alone, a right to anonymity. The fact is that there is no such right in the Constitution and that Warren and Brandeis, truly Brandeis alone if one understands the author, develops such "right" from well established common law principles. This was a brilliant paper and in many ways is as important today and it was over a hundred years ago. It would have been interesting for the author to detail this paper a bit more. The author returns to this topic of privacy in the discussion of the Olmstead case on pp 628-632. This was the first wiretapping case where the Court ruled that there was no need for a warrant and thus no 4th Amendment protection. Brandeis' writing on his dissent is quite telling and it should have gotten a bit more coverage by the author. Brandeis states in his dissent:
"Of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers, from the inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all others would lose half their value."
To me this needs a substantially longer discussion but the author does do it some credit.
The second issue is the relationship between Brandeis and Taylor and Galbreth, both early 20th century management consultants. There is a recent article in The New Yorker by Jill Lepore, a superb piece of critical and historical analysis of Brandeis, which discusses this relationship in detail and presents many of the weaknesses in Brandeis. Lepore looks at Brandeis through the lens of the management and efficiency consultants, in may ways the hucksters who predated the current Business Schools. She starts her article by stating:
"Ordering people around, which used to be just a way to get things done, was elevated to a science in October of 1910, when Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from Boston, held a meeting at an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts who, at Brandeis's urging, decided to call what they were experts at "scientific management." Everyone there--including Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, best known today as the parents in "Cheaper by the Dozen"--had contracted "Tayloritis": they were enthralled by an industrial engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had been ordering people around, scientifically, for years."
The essence of the tale is that Brandeis, who at the time was sitting on a regulatory body which controlled the monopoly like rates of railroadsm had gotten enthralled with the less than scientific work of Taylor and the Gilbreths. He then saw that railroads should employ these new management techniques and then lower their rates. Simple, except as Lepore states, the Taylor results were a fraud! Perhaps there is a lesson here for many other "scientifically" based causes seeking legal justification. Brandeis was a brilliant legal scholar, however he had no expertise in the area of actually running a company. He did however understand the "books" and "records" of a company and as such he had used this profitably in his law practice. Yet the Taylor approach assumed you looked forward and not backward, that you understood the business as a living entity and not just the records of what happened. Brandeis was a lawyer at heart, as such he always looked backwards for precedent.
The author of the present biography gives, in my opinion, short shrift to this issue discussed by Lepore. He covers it on pp 240-243 but his discussion misses the key point presented by Lepore. Namely that Brandies became enamored with Taylor and Galbreth and that Taylor according to Lepore was somewhat of a fraud, the Taylor data it is alleged was all fabricated, and Galbreth had little if any basis for his facts and recommendations.
The author has done a superb job at writing the biography. Yet it does have in my opinion certain weaknesses. In certain parts of the text the sentences are wonderful but the paragraphs do not hold together, there is jumping around in time and in concepts being discussed. In contrast, the Lepore article has a style that is quite readable, whereas that of Urofsky is at times cumbersome and pedantic. As stated in my discussion of privacy and "management", Brandeis set the gold standard for privacy and I believe Urofsky could have taken that further, and with Taylor and Galbreth, I believe Brandeis just did not do his home work, and this was a failing.
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