The Proud Inventor of Judicial Activism
Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion
by Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel
—Reviewed by Adam Fleisher
William Brennan was a relatively obscure judge on New Jersey’s highest court when President Eisenhower nominated the Democrat to the Supreme Court. The nomination was generally well received on both sides of the aisle. But Brennan had written some opinions that ‘might have given a conservative Republican pause,” in the foreboding words of Seth Stern and Stephen Wermeil. And indeed, from the moment Brennan arrived on the Court in 1956 until he retired in 1990, he proved …
