Judge Dennis Davis
Judge Brandeis
Summary
Judge Davis discusses the tale of Judge Brandeis, who evolved from the people’s lawyer to become the first Jew appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
The answer to that was he’d made a significant contribution to Woodrow Wilson. He was a Republican who made significant contribution to Wilson’s economic policy. It was he who essentially believed, as I indicated, that the Federal Trade Commission, which was the commission which became central to the enforcement to the Sherman Act, and to the Clayton Act, which followed the Sherman Act, and in which, again, Brandeis played a very significant role. These were very central planks of the Wilson policy, and he was a very, very prominent, brilliant lawyer, and therefore, being both politically connected and brilliant seemed to me that for that reason more than any other, that Wilson wanted him there, and he wanted him there, because he shared his particular view precisely in relation to the question of the economic policies to which I’ve outlined.
Yes, to the Supreme Court, yes, and of course, that’s more than possible, by the way, out of interest, although she was a solicitor general. Another distinguished Jewish judge Elena Kagan on the court now, who has graced the court with great dignity and flourishing intellectual eloquence. Although she was solicitor general, when I was at teaching at Harvard, she was the dean. She became a solicitor general, and then she went on to the court, so it’s very possible. You don’t have to be a… You don’t have to be a practise, sorry, a judge in order to get there.