Jeffrey Rosen
Jeffrey Rosen
Jeffrey Rosen is an American academic and commentator on legal affairs. Legal historian David Garrow has called him "the nation's most widely read and influential legal commentator". Since 2013, he has served as the President and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia...
Jeffrey Rosen quotes about
challenges democracy needs
It can sound trite if you just say citizens need to be educated for democracy to work, but for him it wasn't trite. It was really this strenuous challenge to citizens to use their moments of leisure, which he defined as time away from work, to collect the facts that were necessary for full democratic participation.
government self top-down
He's [Louis Brandais] so suspicious of bigness in government as well as business that he mistrusts even really top-down reforms at the state level. The most inspiring part of his legacy to me is his belief in the imperative and duty of self-education on behalf of citizens.
fashion government views
[Tomas] Jefferson is more out of fashion, both because of his views on race, where he's properly questioned, that part of his legacy, but also because the libertarian critique of bigness in business and government, the idea that size is a danger is something that's shared on the right when it comes to government and on the left when it comes to corporations, but not both.
opportunity hands people
[Louis] Brandeis, like [Tomas] Jefferson, is an equal opportunity critic of bigness. And he, like Jefferson, sees American history as this incredible clash between small producers, farmers, and small business people on the one hand, and wicked oligarchs and financiers and monopolists on the other.
running egalitarianism white
That strain of anti-monopoly crusading egalitarianism really runs throughout American history from [Tomas] Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, that finds its apotheosis in [Louis] Brandeis, continues through the New Deal, but then it sort of peters out in the '60s because progressives in particular become more interested in extending equality to minorities, and women, and other excluded groups, and little more suspicious of these old white guys, often from the south, who were crusaders against monopolies.
thinking together example
Do you think Bernie Sanders, for example, is citing Theodore Roosevelt as the progenitor of his critique of the banks when actually Roosevelt wanted to keep the banks together and regulate them.
political vision benches
[Louis] Brandeis had a very distinctive vision of political economy that he persuaded Woodrow Wilson to adopt in the 1912 election and that he largely enacted from the bench.
law views judging
[Louis] Brandeis is often painted as an acolyte of judicial restraint, or the view that judges should uphold laws whether or not they like them.
believe law agency
I came to believe that actually [Louis] Brandeis tended to uphold laws that he liked and strike down those that he didn't, generally strike down centralizing federal agencies in the New Deal, and uphold state economic experimentation.
age movement influential
[Louis Brandeis] at the age of 57 decided to become the head of the American Zionist movement was more influential than anyone else in the 20th century in persuading Woodrow Wilson to recognize a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
believe party tea
He [Louis Brandais] did believe in the states famously as laboratories of democracy, to use that resonant phrase that Tea Party and conservative libertarians have embraced today because he loves state experimentation.
mean thinking justice
I think he's [Louis Brandeis] a great model for progressive justices today who want to answer the originalists. It's not that the original paradigm cases are irrelevant, but you have to focus on the values the framers were trying to protect, not on the means with which those values were invaded in the 18th century.
law people morality
[Oliver Wendell] Holmes never believed in the truth and morality of the laws he was upholding. He said, "I loathe the thick-fingered clowns we call the people."
thinking light justice
I think [Louis] Brandeis challenges all of the current justices. As he said, "If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold." You have to take the values that the framers were concerned about and translate them into this new age.