Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.
Today’s Justice of the Day is: WILLIAM J. BRENNAN, JR. Justice Brennan was born on this day, April 25, in 1906.
Justice Brennan was born in Newark, New Jersey, the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in 1928, before moving on to attend Harvard Law School, where he would earn an LL.B. in 1931.
Immediately after graduating from law school, Justice Brennan launched his career in private practice in his home town of Newark, where he would work from then to 1942 and 1946 to 1949. He served as a United States Army Colonel during and just after the Second World War (specifically from 1942 to 1946). Justice Brenan became a Judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey in 1949, where he would remain until his appointment to the Supreme Court of New Jersey in 1952; during that time he served in the Superior Court’s Law Division from 1949 to 1951, and spent the remainder of his time in the Appellate Division. He would ultimately stay on the New Jersey Supreme Court bench until his appointment to the SCUS.
Justice Brennan received a recess appointment from President Dwight D. Eisenhower on October 15, 1956, to a seat vacated by Justice Sherman Minton, and took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on October 16. He was nominated on January 14, 1957, before being confirmed by the United States Senate on March 19, and receiving his commission on March 21. Justice Brennan served on the Warren, Burger and Rehnquist Courts, and assumed senior status on July 20, 1990, due to illness. His service was terminated on July 24, 1997, due to his death.
As with Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice Brennan was among the appointees that President Eisenhower would later come to most regret. An associate of President Eisenhower’s supposedly once saw Justice Brennan delivering a speech that he felt showed a surprising level of judicial conservatism, and convinced the President to pick him; it has been said that President Eisenhower agreed to the choice because he thought that choosing a Catholic Northeastern Democrat would shore up support among a perceived weak demographic he needed for his reelection bid (he ultimately won by such a landslide margin that this effort may have been essentially irrelevant in the end). Justice Brennan would go on to become perhaps the most important member of the SCUS’s liberal wing in his era, as well as the seventh longest-serving Member of the SCUS in its history. In fact, Justice Antonin Scalia, a famous ideological opponent of Justice Brennan, once conceded that he was “probably the most influential justice of the [20th] century.”