"Her opinions, sometimes joined by no other justice, have been the subject of scornful criticism from the right and have raised questions about her relationships with her fellow justices, including the other two members of its liberal wing."

Writes Adam Liptak, in The New York Times, about Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“We will not dwell on Justice Jackson’s argument, which is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself,” Justice Barrett wrote, in an opinion [in Trump v. CASA] signed by all five of the other Republican appointees.

“The principal dissent focuses on conventional legal terrain,” Justice Barrett went on, referring to Justice Sotomayor’s opinion. “Justice Jackson, however, chooses a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever.”...

I think Liptak is trying to build Jackson's reputation. He writes things like: "Justice Jackson has appeared comfortable expressing herself from the start." He compares her to Justice Breyer and Justice Brandeis:

“I was frightened to death for the first three years,” Justice Breyer said in a 2006 interview. Even Justice Louis D. Brandeis, a giant of the law who sat on the court from 1916 to 1939, needed time to find his footing. “So extraordinary an intellect as Brandeis said it took him four or five years to feel that he understood the jurisprudential problems of the court,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote of his friend and mentor. 

That does not work as a compliment to Jackson.

ADDED: The Washington Post just published a similar article, "One of the Supreme Court’s sharpest critics sits on it/Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson emerges as a strong voice on an unusually fractious U.S. Supreme Court."

"There are various theories purporting to explain Musk’s hard right turn: a childhood in apartheid South Africa, his connection with Peter Thiel, disappointments in his personal life."

"Whatever the truth of the matter, whatever right-leaning tendencies he may have had before a couple years ago appear to have been latent or unformed. Now the transformation is almost complete. He’s done with general 'free speech' grievance and springing for alternative viewpoints. He’s routinely pushing all the far right storylines from woke groomers to great replacement. One particularly notable hint about the future came in a fractious interaction on Wednesday when Musk rolled out his own antic Dolchstoßlegende manque. In exchange about advertiser departures and alleged media bias, Musk claimed that he had cut a with [sic] civil rights groups to create a 'moderation council' but that they had broken the deal. Perhaps needless to say, this did not happen. The reference is to a chaotic meeting Musk held with a group of leaders of prominent civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the ADL, on November 2nd. Musk actually announced the 'moderation council' days earlier. We’re hardly four weeks into the Elon era on Twitter and he’s already cueing up a storyline in which he tried to placate the Blacks and the Jews and the gays but they betrayed him and set out to 'kill Twitter.' Not pretty...."

Writes Josh Marshall in "Elon Musk and the Narcissism/Radicalization Maelstrom" (TPM).

I'm not vouching for any of that, and it doesn't reflect my opinion of what Musk is doing with Twitter. I just think it's an important viewpoint that ought to be out in the sunlight.

By the way, who first said "Sunlight is the best disinfectant"? Was it Justice Brandeis?

Here's Quote Investigator:

100 years ago today, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the 19th Amendment.

The case was Leser v. Garnett, 258 U.S. 130, with Justice Brandeis writing for the Court:

On October 12, 1920, Cecilia Street Waters and Mary D. Randolph, citizens of Maryland, applied for and were granted registration as qualified voters in Baltimore City. To have their names stricken from the list Oscar Leser and others brought this suit in the court of common pleas. The only ground of disqualification alleged was that the applicants for registration were women, whereas the Constitution of Maryland limits the suffrage to men.

"Before the cares of the White House were his own, President Harding is reported to have said that government, after all, is a very simple thing."

"He must have said that, if he said it, as a fleeting inhabitant of fairyland. The opposite is the truth. A constitutional democracy like ours is perhaps the most difficult of man's social arrangements to manage successfully. Our scheme of society is more dependent than any other form of government on knowledge and wisdom and self-discipline for the achievement of its aims. For our democracy implies the reign of reason on the most extensive scale. The Founders of this Nation were not imbued with the modern cynicism that the only thing that history teaches is that it teaches nothing. They acted on the conviction that the experience of man sheds a good deal of light on his nature. It sheds a good deal of light not merely on the need for effective power if a society is to be at once cohesive and civilized, but also on the need for limitations on the power of governors over the governed. To that end, they rested the structure of our central government on the system of checks and balances. For them, the doctrine of separation of powers was not mere theory; it was a felt necessity. Not so long ago, it was fashionable to find our system of checks and balances obstructive to effective government. It was easy to ridicule that system as outmoded — too easy.... A scheme of government like ours no doubt at times feels the lack of power to act with complete, all-embracing, swiftly moving authority.... I know no more impressive words on this subject than those of Mr. Justice Brandeis: 'The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787 not to promote efficiency, but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was not to avoid friction, but,  by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.'"

Wrote Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1952, concurring in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer.

"Getting rid of law clerks would eliminate the harassment problem and get judges doing their own work."

"Justice Louis Brandeis, who served from 1916-39, is said to have observed that the high court’s members 'are almost the only people in Washington who do their own work.' That’s not true anymore. The Supreme Court decided 160 cases in 1945, when each justice had a single clerk. Nowadays it decides about half as many cases with four clerks per justice. Law clerks were unknown for roughly the first century of the American judiciary, and the courts seemed to do fine. As my law students often comment, the older opinions are shorter and more intelligible than the newer ones."

Writes Glenn Reynolds in the Wall Street Journal.

It really is a very creepy and elitist system, and the unreadable cases — do the judges even read their "own" cases? — are a form of corruption.

On my suspicion that judges have lost track of what's in their own opinions, here's a passage from Woodward and Armstrong's "The Brethren" (which I've blogged before):

[A] clerk once pointed out, “You said that the right to privacy must go further than the home.” “No,” [Thurgood] Marshall retorted. He had never said that.

Yes, the clerk insisted.

No, never, Marshall was sure. “Show me.”

The clerk brought the bound opinions.

Marshall read the relevant section.

“That’s not my opinion, that’s the opinion of [a clerk from the prior term],” he declared. Opening the volume flat, he tore the page out. “There. It’s not there now, is it?”

"Healthy Justice Louis Brandeis every day ate one spinach leaf between two slices of whole wheat bread..."

"... whereas Justice Harlan Stone consumed platters of French cheeses with paired wines... Justice David Souter would eat for lunch 'just… plain… yogurt,' Ginsburg said with perfect delivery. Sotomayor added that sometimes he would have an apple, but Ginsburg maintained that the apple came later in the afternoon..... [T]he Justices eat together when one of them is celebrating a birthday; Chief Justice John Roberts will often bring a bottle of wine on those days... Ginsburg recalled the various foods hunted and prepared by their 'dear colleague,' the late Justice Antonin Scalia: fish, fowl, even 'Bambi,' she joked fondly. Sotomayor told a story in which Justice Stephen Breyer decided to serve his grandchildren pheasant, which Scalia had recently bagged. Afraid that pellets might still be in the bird, the children refused to eat it."

Link.

"As corporate rather than government actors, the Deciders aren’t formally bound by the First Amendment."

"But to protect the best qualities of the Internet, they need to summon the First Amendment principle that the only speech that can be banned is that which threatens to provoke imminent violence, an ideal articulated by Justice Louis Brandeis in 1927. It’s time, in other words, for some American free-speech imperialism if the Web is to remain open and free in twenty-first century."

This is a big subject for me, something I've argued with Bob Wright about, notably in this March 2011 post: "The Bob Wright/Ann Althouse email exchange about what free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News."

ADDED: Here's a clip from March 2011:

"Justice John Paul Stevens is the greatest Justice in Supreme Court history."

Argues Cliff Sloan, a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, & Flom and a former Stevens law clerk. A key move in this argument is excluding the Chief Justices on the theory that they have extra powers so it's not a proper comparison. Then Sloan has 4 reasons:

First, his record of protecting and maintaining the rule of law during the “war on terror” stands unique in Supreme Court annals....

Second, Justice Stevens has fundamentally changed – and strengthened – the Court’s jurisprudence regarding personal freedom.... [He] has successfully re-framed the Court’s conceptual framework for personal freedom from a general “privacy” right, which is not mentioned explicitly in the Constitution, to a “liberty” right, which is prominently and explicitly protected in the Constitution....

Third, Justice Stevens has steadfastly sought to enforce the rule of law even when the Presidency hangs in the balance....

Fourth, Justice Stevens has powerfully re-shaped the law in an astonishing range of areas....

Go to the link to see the cases Sloan discusses. I would note that in some of the cases, Stevens has had something akin to the superpower that Sloan used to exclude Chief Justices from the analysis. When the Chief Justice isn't in the majority, the most senior Justice in the majority decides who will write the opinion. As such, over the last 20 years, he's authored many of the important opinions where the liberal side of the Court had the majority. That he wrote the opinion on the side that Sloan prefers isn't the evidence of a personal stamp on the law that Sloan would have us think.

Once Sloan gets to identifying and excluding the the competition for greatest Justice, the argument falls badly apart. He has to really strain to minimize Brandeis, Holmes, Brennan, Story, and the first Justice Harlan. He lost me here, but you've got to give Sloan credit for writing what would be a strong entry in a competition requiring an essay titled "Justice John Paul Stevens is the greatest Justice in Supreme Court history."

"The hope that the next justice will be a check on the power of corporations is entirely appropriate."

Writes Jeffrey Rosen:

After all, Stevens holds the seat that was previously occupied by William O. Douglas and Louis Brandeis, two of the leading anti-corporate crusaders of the twentieth century....

Anti-corporate crusaders? Sure, pick an anti-corporate crusader, Obama, and let's see how the back-and-forth in the Senate Judiciary Committee plays out. I mean, the nominee will still be confirmed, but in the rest of the political arena, leading up to the November elections? That would be brutal for the Democrats.

Yet none of the leading candidates for the Court appears to be an economic populist....

Why the absence of liberal economic populists from the shortlist?...

Since the 1960s, grassroots progressives have focused on non-economic issues: reproductive choice, for example, or civil liberties in an age of terrorism. That means that the current Supreme Court candidates had their legal sensibilities shaped in a political environment that was less preoccupied with questions of economic justice....

The Supreme Court itself stopped its own progressive forward glide when the opportunities for expanding constitutional rights arose in the context of redistribution of wealth (which is what Rosen and his ilk spin as "economic justice").

That’s a shame, because the most important issues the Roberts Court will confront over the next decade involve the constitutionality of environmental measures and economic regulations passed in the wake of the crash of 2008.... [I]t will not be enough for liberals simply to champion judicial deference for its own sake. The next justice will, like Brandeis and Douglas, need to make a substantive case for why these regulations are indispensable to protecting American democracy from the narrow interests of a corporate oligarchy....

If "environmental measures and economic regulations" are going to be passed, then why is anything more than deference to legislatures needed? Why should a Supreme Court Justice think he could bolster arguments for deference to democracy by expressing enthusiasm for the substance of the choices that legislatures have made?

The judicial role is strengthened by the appearance of neutrality and fidelity to law. Conversely, judges undercut their own power when they make it sound as though they are reaching their decisions because of their support for legislation that is challenged as a violation of constitutional rights. When arguments for constitutional rights fail, it should be (or at least appear to be) because the claimed rights don't exist, not because the rights claimants' interests are "narrow" and run counter to what the majority wants. Rights are supposed to work against the preference of the majority, so we should be wary of someone who says courts must "protect[] American democracy from... narrow interests." He is saying rights are not rights.

Although the next justice may not be an economic populist, the confirmation hearings ahead are an opportunity to cast the spotlight on the intersection between economic populism and the law. Leahy and other Senate Democrats should use the hearings to ask the nominee to discuss these questions in depth. 

Great! A bloodbath. Sounds exciting. I'll watch.

Justice Louis Brandeis said get out of Washington: "I believe that every man should get back to his hinterland."

From an Anthony Lewis review of a new biography:

Law clerks and other young people who met Justice Brandeis learned how serious he was in his commitment to the states. He would advise them to leave Washington and go home. A lawyer I knew in Washington in the 1950s, Joseph A. Fanelli, told me that he went to Washington from Harvard Law School in 1935. Sometime later he had a telephone call from the justice's messenger, Edward Poindexter, saying that the Brandeises invited him for tea. Fanelli went to their apartment, was handed tea, and introduced himself when the justice came into the room. "What do you do, Mr. Fanelli?" "I'm with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, Mr. Justice." "Don't stay too long!" Brandeis said, and moved on.

Fanelli was invited back once a year, and the same conversation occurred. He achieved such seniority that his wife (he had married) was asked to help pour the tea, and Fanelli was determined to break through the formula. When the justice said, "Don't stay too long!" he quickly asked, "Why do you say that, Mr. Justice?" "Because, Mr. Fanelli, I believe that every man should get back to his hinterland." "But, Mr. Justice, I come from New York. I don't have any hinterland." "That, sir, is your misfortune," Brandeis replied. And moved on.