William J. Brennan

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Image:US Supreme Court Justice William Brennan - 1976 official portrait.jpg William Joseph Brennan, Jr. (April 25, 1906 – July 24, 1997) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He believed in the "essential dignity and worth of each individual," his words from a 1987 speech.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Supreme Court 2.1 Warren Court 2.2 Burger and Rehnquist Court 2.3 Judicial philosophy 3 Trivia

Early life

Brennan was the second of eight children. His parents, William Brennan and Agnes (McDermott) were Irish immigrants. They met in the United States, although both were originally from County Roscommon in Ireland. His father had little education; he worked as a metal polisher. However, he rose to a position of leadership, serving as the Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Newark from 1917 to 1930.

Brennan attended public schools in Newark, New Jersey, graduating from Barringer High School. He then attended Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with a degree in Economics in 1928. While at the University, he was a member of Delta Tau Delta Fraternity.

Brennan married Marjorie Leonard, whom he had met in high school, when he was 21. They eventually had three children: William, Nancy and Hugh.

Brennan completed his law degree at Harvard in 1931 and entered private practice in his home state of New Jersey. He practiced labor law.

He entered the Army as a Major in March 1942, and left as a Colonel in 1945. He did legal work for the ordnance division. In 1949, Brennan was appointed to the Superior Court (a Trial court) by Governor of New Jersey Alfred E. Driscoll. In 1951, Driscoll appointed him to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

Supreme Court

Brennan was named to the U.S. Supreme Court through a recess appointment by Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, shortly before the 1956 presidential election. Presidential advisers thought the appointment of a Catholic Democrat from the northeast would woo critical voters in the upcoming election for Eisenhower, a Republican. He was confirmed by the United States Senate with only Senator Joseph McCarthy dissenting. He filled the seat vacated by Justice Sherman Minton. He held the post until his retirement on July 20, 1990 for health reasons; he was succeeded on the Court by Justice David Souter. Brennan then taught at Georgetown University Law Center until 1994. With 1,360 opinions, he is second only to William O. Douglas in number of opinions written while a Supreme Court justice.

Warren Court

An outspoken liberal throughout his career, he played a leading role in the Warren Court's dramatic expansion of individual rights. Brennan played a large behind-the-scenes role during the Warren Court, coaxing more conservative colleagues to join the Court's expansion of individual rights. Brennan's opinions with respect to voting (Baker v. Carr), criminal proceedings (Malloy v. Hogan), the free speech and establishment clauses of the First Amendment (Roth v. United States), and civil rights (Green v. New Kent County) were some of the most important opinions of the Warren Era. Brennan's role in expanding individual speech rights under the First Amendment is particuarly notable, as he wrote the opinion of the court in 1964's New York Times v. Sullivan, which created constitutional restrictions on the law of libel. It was Brennan who coined the phrase "chilling effect", in 1965's Dombrowski v. Pfister.

Burger and Rehnquist Court

On the more moderate Burger Court, Brennan was a staunch opponent of the death penalty, and a supporter of abortion rights, and joined the majority in landmark rulings on both issues (1972's Furman v. Georgia on the death penalty and 1973's Roe v. Wade on abortion). With the accession of William Rehnquist to the position of Chief Justice, and the replacement of Warren Burger and Lewis Powell with Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy, respectively, Brennan found himself more frequently isolated, often joined in his opinions only by Thurgood Marshall. Brennan declared in Furman that he believed the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on "cruel and unusual" punishment, and for his remaining years on the bench he and Marshall dissented from every case upholding the imposition of the death penalty. He was able to convince no other justice of this view, though Justice Harry Blackmun would eventually agree in 1994-- after Brennan's retirement.

In his penultimate and final terms on the Court, he wrote the controversial rulings for Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, respectively. In both cases, the Court held that the First Amendment protects flag desecration.

Brennan's wife Marjorie died in 1982. A few months later, in 1983, he married Mary Fowler, who had served as his secretary for 26 years. He was 79 years old. Brennan's colleagues learned of his second marriage via a short office memo stating, "Mary Fowler and I were married yesterday and we have gone to Bermuda."

Judicial philosophy

Brennan's conservative detractors, while acknowleding his legal acumen, thought him the embodiment of the worst features of judicial activism. Brennan's general strategy on cases was to acknowledge the validity of the governmental interest justifying the given law, but to find the law in question not narrowly tailored to achieve that interest. Thus, Brennan generally shied away from the absolutist positions of Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, though he agreed with many of the results they would reach in cases involving individual rights. For more, see Bradley C. S. Watson, "The Jurisprudence of William Joseph Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall" in History of American Political Thought.

In the 1980s, as the Reagan Admistration and the Rehnquist Court threatened to "roll back" the achievements of the Warren Court, Brennan became more vocal about his jurisprudential views. In a 1985 speech at Georgetown University, Brennan criticized Attorney General Edwin Meese's call for a "jurisprudence of original intention" as "arrogance cloaked as humility" and advocated reading the U.S. Constitution to protect rights of "human dignity."

Brennan was also less interested in stare decisis or the avoidance of "absolutist" positions where the death penalty was concerned. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall concluded in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty was, in all circumstances, unconstitutional, and never accepted the legitimacy of Gregg v. Georgia, which ruled that the death penalty was constitutional three years later. Thereafter, Brennan or Marshall took turns, joined by the other, in mechanically issuing a dissent in every denial of certiorari in a capital case, and from every decision in a case which the court did take which failed to vacate a sentence of death. (See Woodward, The Bretheren; Lazarus, Closed Chambers.)

Trivia

The D.C.-based indie rock band Fugazi wrote the song Dear Justice Letter in memory of the deceased Brennan, presumably as the band shares many of his social and political beliefs.

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