Louis D. Brandeis Quotes
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
Louis D. Brandeis, 1856-1941, U. S. Supreme Court Justice, Dissenting Opinion, Olmstead v. United States, 1927
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Jefferson and many others thought the original drafting of the Constitution was deficient in not explicitly protecting rights from the government. See {586024}. When it came time for ratification, it was clear that ratification would not take place unless that was remedied and the Bill of Rights made the ratification possible by satisfying many critics of whom Jefferson was but one. Note that the protection sought was from the President and the Congress.
To the pro-slavery politician, abolition was an abdication of government to fulfill it’s 3 major responsibilities. Slaves were private property and government had to safeguard the owner’s right to own that property. Slave owners had always been free in America to hold slaves, and abolition impinged on that freedom. And the slavery advocates knew better than the abolitionists how cruelly the slaves had been treated. They reasoned—that if anyone had treated them that way, they would if they could take revenge and kill the slave owners. Therefore, abolition threatened the lives of Southern citizens. Of course, Brown and his fellow slave-owners did not consider the fact that they had interfered with the right of the slave to own property, they denied him freedom, and in many cases killed slaves as examples or out of neglect. Their “logic” was that slaves were not citizens and therefor were not entitled to these protection.
Louis Dembitz Brandeis was an American lawyer and associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish immigrant parents from Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), who raised him in a secular home. He attended Harvard Law School, graduating at the age of 20 with the highest grade point average in the law school's history. Brandeis settled in Boston, where he founded a law firm (that is still in practice today as Nutter McClennen & Fish) and became a recognized lawyer through his work on progressive social causes.
