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
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.
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."
school law people
When I was in law school I was taught that the great writers were people like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes Jr. and [Benjamin N.] Cardozo. But you go back and read their prose and it's sort of perfumed and very ornate and show-offy. And they're constantly striving for these abstractions that seem archaic nowadays.
writing sister-in-law mind
Louis Brandeis actually changes his mind about women's suffrage because he works with these brilliant women in the women's suffrage movement like Josephine Goldmark, his sister-in-law, where he writes a Brandeis brief which convinced the court to uphold maximum hour laws for women by collecting all these facts and empirical evidence.
school law government
Unlike [Woodrow] Wilson, Louis Brandeis did not support the segregation of the federal government. He was personally courteous to African Americans. He advised them and advised the head of Howard University to create a good law school. And that inspired Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall in their path-breaking work on behalf of desegregation.
ability achieve along boarding cases colleagues decisions discussing fellow glasses justices moderation simply unanimity
Temperament, conviviality, moderation and the ability to get along with your colleagues are as important as ideology, ... was able to achieve unanimity on the most important decisions of his era simply by encouraging his fellow justices to live in the same boarding house, and discussing cases over glasses of Madeira.
brakes chief court efficiency era excesses hundred impressive justices keeping led majority pace past quietly sentiments warren
With exceptional efficiency and amiability, he led a court that put the brakes on some of the excesses of the Earl Warren era while keeping pace with the sentiments of a majority of the country. His administration of the court was brilliantly if quietly effective, making him one of the most impressive chief justices of the past hundred years.
agents although capacity citizens fbi forbidden government greatly increase innocent knowledge legally mere messages targets technical
Although the FBI is legally forbidden from monitoring the communications of citizens who are not targets under Carnivore, the mere knowledge that government agents have the technical capacity to read e-mail messages will greatly increase the uncertainty of innocent citizens,
stars rocks musical
Basically [Louise] Brandeis was a Jeffersonian. And you say the timing is great, and it is in a lot of senses, except not for [Tomas] Jefferson, because this is a Hamiltonian moment, and he's the rock star of the minute with a great musical.
mind sides argument
[Louis Brandeis] insisted on the necessity of public reason, which he thought could only be achieved if all of us just take the time to inform ourselves about the best arguments on all sides of questions so that we can make up our own minds.
book intellectual mind
I was very much influenced by a great book by the scholar Neil Richards called Intellectual Privacy, that [Louis] Brandeis changed his mind on the proper balance between dignity and free speech.
moving thinking justice
I think even though the court is moving toward trying to translate the Constitution into a digital age, there was that wonderful unanimous decision that Chief Justice Roberts wrote saying you can't search a cellphone on arrest without a warrant.
party thinking data
I don't think he would have had any trouble answering Justice Sonia Sotomayor's excellent challenge in a case involving GPS surveillance. She said we need an alternative to this whole way of thinking about the privacy now which says that when you give data to a third party, you have no expectations of privacy. And [Louis] Brandeis would have said nonsense, of course you have expectations of privacy because it's intellectual privacy that has to be protected. That's my attempt to channel him on some of those privacy questions.