Facts And Broad Theories Poem by gershon hepner

Some people treat all facts as pegs
on which broad theories may hang,
but often theories have legs,
and so some try, without a bang,
to make the facts explode,
in order to accommodate
their beauty, like a winding road
unobstructed by a gate.

Inspired by an article by Adam Liptak reviewing Melvin I. Urofsky’s biography of Louis D. Brandeis (“How Brandeis, Revered or Hated, Became a Giant in the Supreme Court, ” NYT, September 21,2009) . Liptak writes:
Brandeis was the first Jewish justice, and Taft’s comment at least flirts with anti-Semitism. But Mr. Urofsky generally plays down the role anti-Semitism played in the hearings, where the subject of Brandeis’s religion arose only once, and in Brandeis’s career generally. It was Brandeis’s perceived radical beliefs and hostility to business interests that provoked his enemies, Mr. Urofsky concludes; being Jewish was “a complicating factor.” On the court and as a lawyer, Brandeis insisted on a comprehensive mastery of the facts. In 1908, defending an Oregon law limiting women’s work hours, he submitted a 113-page brief to the Supreme Court. Two of those pages were devoted to legal argument; the rest marshaled medical and other evidence. Lawyers still call such fact-based submissions “Brandeis briefs.” Brandeis is often paired with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., his frequent ally in dissent on a generally conservative court. But they arrived at similar positions by very different routes. Holmes liked abstractions and gnomic epigrams; Brandeis cherished detailed information. “He loves facts, ” Holmes said of Brandeis, “and I hate them except as the necessary peg to hang generalizations on.” Brandeis, by contrast, wrote that “knowledge is essential to understanding; and understanding should precede judging.”


9/21/09