Sunlight as a Disinfectant: Justice Louis Brandeis

August 11, 2019

Sunlight as a Disinfectant: Justice Louis Brandeis

sunlight

Louis Brandeis

Justice Louis Brandeis served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1916 until 1939. He was America’s great lawyer before he joined the Court and, always, a great writer. In Other People’s Money – and How Banker’s Use It (1914), he observed:

Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.

Our nation suffers from a social disease which has plagued us for its entire existence: racism. Wait. What? When we elected Barack Obama we got a post-racial America. Shangri-La. Right? Uh, not so much, for Mr. Obama handed over the keys

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Retention Elections at the Supreme Court

September 21, 2015

The United States Supreme Court is comprised of nine justices. Presently, their age span is 82 to 55, with four justices—Ginsburg, Scalia, Kennedy, and Breyer—between 77 and 82. On January 20, 2017, those four justices will be 83, 80, 80, and 78, respectively. They will also have been serving for 23, 30, 28, and 22 years, respectively.

My point? The 2016 election may be about only one thing which really matters: the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Many people holler about the Supreme Court. Some people are genuinely concerned about a group of people who come from remarkably similar professional backgrounds. Read Is the Court We Have the Court We Want?, which I wrote in May 2014, for

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