Justice William Brennan, a liberal lion who wouldn't hire women

by David J. Garrow

Washington Post
October 17, 2010

William J. Brennan Jr. served on the Supreme Court from 1956 to 1990 and came to be seen as "the very symbol of judicial activism." As Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel write in this superb, definitive and long-awaited biography, based in part on extensive interviews that Brennan gave to Wermiel, he also became "perhaps the most influential justice of the entire twentieth century."

Brennan was a 50-year-old Roman Catholic Democrat and a seven-year veteran of the New Jersey state courts when Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- or, more truthfully, Attorney General Herbert Brownell -- chose him for the Supreme Court. As a state jurist, Brennan "had certainly not developed anything resembling a coherent judicial philosophy," and his first five years on the top court exhibited no consistent approach.

By 1962, however, in tandem with Chief Justice Earl Warren, Brennan had begun to mold a solid liberal majority that revolutionized constitutional interpretation with regard to reapportionment, freedom of speech, privacy and the rights of criminal defendants. Stern and Wermiel reveal, however, that even in the mid-1960s, Brennan's young law clerks were crafting much of the language for the justice's most important opinions, such as New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which transformed libel law.

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