Brandeis Legacy
Founded in 1846 as the University of Louisville Law Department, Brandeis Law is Kentucky's oldest law school and the nation’s fifth oldest law school in continuous operation. In 1923, after national standards of professional legal education had emerged, it officially became the School of Law; in 1938, it moved from downtown to its current location on the University’s Belknap campus; and in 1950, it merged with the nearby Jefferson School of Law. Finally, in 1997, it was renamed the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, in honor of the United State Supreme Court Justice and Louisville native son who had invested so heavily in its success.
Over the years, Justice Brandeis gave the School of Law his personal library, including many rare texts on early civil and common law, as well as his personal papers. He also aided the school in obtaining the papers of fellow Kentuckian Justice John Marshall Harlan, “the Great Dissenter,” and arranged for the school to receive original briefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, a practice the Court still honors to this day. After his death, Brandeis bequeathed a substantial part of his estate to the University of Louisville. Per his wishes, his remains — and later those of his wife, Alice Goldmark Brandeis — were buried unobtrusively beneath the law school's classical portico.
About Our Namesake
Louis D. Brandeis was born on November 13, 1856, in Louisville. After graduating from what is now Louisville Male High School at the age of 14 and studying three terms in Germany, he was drawn to the study of law by his uncle, Lewis Dembitz, a noted practitioner and scholar who published the landmark treatise, Kentucky Jurisprudence, in 1890. Brandeis graduated from Harvard Law School with highest honors and worked briefly at a St. Louis law firm before returning to Boston to establish a partnership with Samuel Warren, together penning the landmark article, “The Right to Privacy.” In 1916, at the age of 60, Brandeis became an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served until 1939, passing away only two years later at the age of 84.
Justice Brandeis’ ethos included a strong devotion to public service and an interdisciplinary approach to law. Addressing the Harvard Ethical Society in 1905, Brandeis opined that the “whole training” in law school should include not only the development of reason and judgment but also the inculcation of a commitment to the legal profession’s public trust. He lamented that many lawyers had neglected this trust, representing the nation's moneyed interests “while the public is often inadequately represented or wholly unrepresented.”
Brandeis didn’t just preach these words, he lived them. In the two decades before he joined the bench, he earned the title of “the people's lawyer,” refusing to accept fees for his public work, to which many experts trace the beginning of pro bono work in the U.S. Recognizing that law is shaped significantly by societal forces, Brandeis believed a lawyer's education must extend beyond the discipline of law itself. Using social and economic data to justify legislative efforts to improve the worst aspects of industrialization, he pioneered what is now known as the "Brandeis brief.” To Brandeis, this crossing of disciplinary boundaries was not an intellectual affectation, it was a fulfillment of the lawyer's duty to master the facts.
Today, Brandeis Law preserves and honors Justice Brandeis’ legacy by instilling in its students the profound value of public service and empowering them to be agents of change for the betterment of society.
