That night, Bill's body was returned to the Brennans' Munn Avenue home, where he remained overnight. It strikes me as balanced and realistic, neither too admiring nor iconoclastic. Brennan graduated college on June 20, 1928, his family having no idea that he was a married man. So instead of a second ceremony, a wedding announcement noting the “secret marriage” ran in the Newark Evening News on June 20, 1931. The book gives a good sense of Brennan-the-man. The younger Brennan, twenty-four, had rushed home by propeller plane from Massachusetts, where he was finishing his second year at Harvard Law School, when it had become clear that his father would not survive a sudden bout of pneumonia. But while he enjoyed putting his feet up on his desk in his City Hall basement office and regaling visitors with tales of growing up in Ireland, Bill divulged little about his childhood to his own family. “No more skulking around!” she ordered. The book's strength is Wermiel's access to Brennan's private case notes (which are closed to the public until 2017) and dozens of interviews with Brennan himself. this book helped me to regain a little of my sense of faith in humanity and in the potential for positive change still resting in this nation. Americans have lost immeasurably since the days of Justice Brennan, but most Americans appear unaware. Brennan probably wore one of his fancy handmade suits in December 1926 when he attended one of the big events of Newark's Christmas social season: a cotillion at the East Orange Women's Club. The job also afforded Bill frequent opportunities to travel. The two following William Jr. were also boys: Charlie, born in 1907, and Tom, born in 1910. He lived in the Delta Tau Delta house for three years, Charlie joining as well. Five weeks before graduating college, Brennan engaged in the first rebellious act of his life. I grabbed this off the Biography shelves at Camden Public Library the other day, sat down, and proceeded to tear-through the middle 100 pages ... about his nomination and elevation to the High Court. Speakeasies sprung up around the city, and speedboats raced out to freighters loaded with bootleg whiskey lingering just off the coast, beyond the three-mile territorial limit. For Brennan and his classmates the system had one advantage: with a class size of 168 students, no one could get called on too frequently. This is that rare easy to read judicial biography. It would not be until 1927 that Bill publicly confessed at an Elks Club lunch that he would finally give up alcohol, but only on his doctor's orders. The Brennan family moved into a triple-decker house on Alexander Street, their most significant step yet out of the urban ghetto. Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2019. A half century earlier, Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell had abandoned textbooks and lectures in favor of having students read legal opinions collected in casebooks and answer questions in a Socratic dialogue, using close questioning to tease out the facts of the case and relevant rules of law. He enjoyed the camaraderie among the mostly Irish stationary firemen and may have had one of his coworkers to thank for introducing him to his wife. Trenton, capital of the nation's pottery industry, was a natural choice, given his apprenticeship in the trade. > One version of the story suggests that Bill boarded at the same house on Plane Street in Newark as Agnes, as she preferred to be called. The next day, the Newark Star Eagle reported that the commissioner was in “very serious condition” with pneumonia in both lungs. Please enter your name. It is also a fine depiction of the relationship between the Court and the American people, fraught as it is with the competing interests of ideology, justice, and the public's intense desire to see the law affirm its own prejudices. So, while we learn Brennan's first wife may have been an alcoholic, the fact is stated with little explanation or interpretive insight, only to periodically re-surface. Yet this grandson of an illiterate Irish tenant farmer had little trouble fitting in at the university founded in 1749 by Benjamin Franklin. The name field is required. During Brennan's high school years, the family relocated a couple of blocks to their second home in Vailsburg, a single-family house on North Munn Avenue. But, as with Brennan's college choice, Bill's thinking about Brennan's career was heavily influenced by a friend's advice. A great book for Court junkies, a very good book for people interested in American political institutions more generally. In fact, Bill had envisioned a business career for his oldest son when he encouraged Brennan to apply to Wharton. In subsequent elections, he also reached out to Newark's small black population. You may send this item to up to five recipients. The Panic of 1893 soon plunged the nation into a deep depression. 33, Stephen Wermiel, American University Washington College of Law, A sweeping insider look at the life of William Brennan, champion of free speech and widely considered the most influential Supreme Court justice of the twentieth century. With its population and industry growing rapidly together, however, Newark was also a place of considerable squalor. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. | In 2006 Wermiel brought in Seth stein who reorganized the vast amount of material and drafted most of the chapter. He was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Eisenhower in 1956. The family's finances had improved considerably after Bill became a city commissioner. This shopping feature will continue to load items when the Enter key is pressed. Do you want to know more about Supreme Court Justice William Brennan? This was the only big reveal in the book. It is hard to imagine a time before these issues were resolved, we take for granted our right to privacy, Miranda rights, and right to choose but there was a time that these could have gone the other way. > The authors attempted to reveal the complicated man beneath. You can easily create a free account. Trenton, capital of the nation's pottery industry, was a natural choice, given his apprenticeship in the trade. Most people did not have that luxury in Newark, where employment at major manufacturers had fallen 25 percent and residents who could not afford to heat their homes filled wheelbarrows and any available conveyance with cords of wood given away at a city firehouse. Although he could enjoy a beer or two with friends without incident, Bill was inclined to drink alone at home when something upset him at work. Brennan's first rebellious act was an incomplete one, however. While it suffers from the most common pitfalls of the genre (e.g., attempting to impart drama if not melodrama to the exchange of memos), it steps lightly through them. Under the new government structure, each commissioner oversaw a separate part of the city government. --The Atlantic Online, "Brennan made a huge mark on our Constitution, and Stern and Wermiel illuminate his legacy remarkably well." I read this as an e-book via my kindle app on my Ipad. But when Marjorie was seven years old, Hugh was killed at his summer training quarters in Belfast, struck by lightning when he ran outside during a storm to take a flag down. Bill accepted the offer, although his tenure on the police board was brief. In the alternative account, Bill accepted an invitation to have dinner one night at the home of a colleague, and Agnes, the host's niece, joined them at the dinner table. FACSCH_BKS Bill's up-by-his-bootstraps rise appealed to voters, and every September beginning in 1921, Bill shored up his image as a man of the people by hosting picnics for thousands of city residents, featuring free soda, hot dogs, and ice cream and lollipops, plus merry-go-rounds and toboggan slides. Bill, as secretary of the strike committee, would have harbored no illusions at this point about the strike's prospects. With little education and no skills other than in pottery, Bill next followed the path traveled by earlier waves of Irish immigrants in New Jersey: manual labor. Wermiel distills decades of valuable information into a seamless, riveting portrait of the man behind the Court's most liberal era. On April 25, 1906, attention in Newark, as in the rest of the country, was focused on San Francisco, where a devastating earthquake had struck exactly one week earlier. Bill subscribed to the Irish World newspaper, joined Irish fraternal organizations such as the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick and the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and treated Saint Patrick's Day as an important holiday. Sadly, the reality of how cases are decided in the federal system now is nothing like what you read in these biographies of judges and justices, especially those from a different era. Bill's most notable crackdown on free speech came in 1926, when he prohibited the showing of The Naked Truth, a silent film in which a father instructs his son about the dangers of venereal disease. Nineteen-year-old Marjorie Leonard had come to the cotillion with another young man as her date, but added Brennan to her dance card. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Both legal scholars and general readers will be delighted with this well-written, superbly documented biography, which may make liberals nostalgic for Brennan's court. He and Marjorie decided to elope. He was denounced as a radical for his vigorous defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian American anarchists for whom Brennan's father refused to allow even a protest meeting in Newark. Protestant church groups and the local chapter of the Anti-Saloon League came down hard on Bill for lax enforcement, insinuating that he was a drunk. Bill dominated the household and brooked no dissent from his children. With little education and no skills other than in pottery, Bill next followed the path traveled by earlier waves of Irish immigrants in New Jersey: manual labor. Overall a very interesting book and well worth the read for those interested in Supreme Court history, This book was a review for me of the work of the Warren Court during the time I was in law school and when I was a new lawyer. Standing vigil nearby was an honor guard of labor, police, and firemen Bill had led as head of the stationary firemen's union and during four terms as city commissioner. Born on December 26, 1872, in Roscommon, a poor rural county on the border between central and western Ireland, about fifty miles north of Galway, Bill was the oldest of six children of Patrick Brennan, an illiterate tenant farmer from the tiny village of Cloonshanville, and Elizabeth Kelley, of Leggatinty, an equally small nearby town. “I saw what it did to my father, and I wanted no part of it,” Brennan recalled. STEPHEN WERMIEL, for twelve years the Wall Street Journal’s Supreme Court reporter, teaches constitutional law at American University Washington College of Law, where he also received his law degree. Before his death, William Brennan granted Stephen Wermiel access to volumes of personal and court materials that are sealed to the public until 2017. Succeeding waves of new arrivals crowded into dilapidated houses adjacent to the neighborhood's many factories. It also analyzes reviews to verify trustworthiness. He began attending a public school just up the block from his family's house on Alexander Street. Living on the edge of affluence, William Jr. was nevertheless acutely aware of inequality and class differences. Having deferred to his father's wishes throughout his childhood, it did not seem to occur to Brennan that he might have a say in the matter. Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion A month after Bill's death, the family suffered another loss when Bill's mother, Elizabeth, died. This is a good resource. Does this book contain inappropriate content? Then he lingered on that one case for a month and four days, dissecting it in such depth that students nicknamed the class “The Case of the Month Club.” Felix Frankfurter was trying to show the two hundred assembled students how law was shaped by outside forces rather than something to be studied in isolation. Downtown, smokestacks dominated the skyline above factories producing everything from beer and chemicals to patent leather and hoisting engines.
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