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My year with Brandeis at the Supreme Court did little to turn me toward an academic career and did even less for my self-esteem. I did not think I served the justice well. I worked only to try to improve,

which I could rarely do, the opinions he had drafted; he had already arrived at his judgments. The "Brandeis brief" had been developed by him as an advocate, introducing evidence from the social sciences to sustain the reasonableness and hence the constitutionality of legislation. The very first case I worked on dispelled any illusion that Brandeis himself would be influenced by empirical data when in pursuit of the larger goal of creating precedents for federal judicial restraint. It was the "Oregon berry box" case (Pacific States Box and Basket Company v. White ), in which Brandeis upheld for a unanimous court an Oregon statute concerning the shape and size of berry boxes. Assigned to write the opinion, Brandeis wanted to establish that the law fell under the state's power to protect the public interest and welfare. He sent me out to discover the actual reasons for the law. I soon found at the Department of Agriculture and the Interstate Commerce Commission that the law was designed to keep out berry boxes manufactured from redwoods in California (redwoods do not grow in Oregon); the law resulted in boxes less equipped for stacking in freight cars. To me, the law was an interference with interstate commerce. Brandeis thought in terms of a long-term strategy in which he wished to reduce centralized power, including the power of the federal courts to declare state legislation unconstitutional. In his building block of precedents he ignored the real story in order to uphold the state's authority, even though in principle he favored free trade and opposed monopolies. Other cases I worked on, such as the famous case upholding the Tennessee Valley Authority indirectly by denying the plaintiffs standing to sue (Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority ), involved only library work and not what was for me more exhilarating detective work and fieldwork.

I shared a house in Georgetown with a group of New Deal lawyers, including Rowe. One of my housemates was Thomas H. Eliot, several years my senior at college and law school, who helped draft and pilot the Social Security legislation through the Congress. Other young men from Columbia, Yale, and Harvard were exercising similar responsibilities. The brisk self-assurance of many of the young New Deal lawyers struck me as awesome in some cases but as disagreeable in others. I had already concluded that Harvard Law School and other national law schools cultivated a belief that outside of a patent, admiralty, or antitrust case, there was nothing one could not get up in a pretrial two weeks. If I lacked the self-confidence of others around me, I was growing in confidence that I might be able to understand events. For example, my early judgment that even unemployed Americans in the years of

the Depression were basically conservative and would not become converts to socialism, let alone communism, was being borne out day by day. I sympathized with the strong Southern Agrarian streak in Brandeis, his distrust of centralized power, and his hope to use the states for small-scale, incremental experiments. However, I lacked the crusading spirit of Brandeis and many of his devotees.^[7]

When I told Brandeis that I wanted to return to Boston, he sought to dissuade me, saying I had enough privilege and enough education; he advised instead that I go to Tupelo, Mississippi, and work there for the TVA and help develop Appalachia. I rejected his advice (as I had also rejected his harsh judgments against the English, based on the restriction of immigration to Palestine, and against the Germans, rather than simply the Nazis). Many notable lawyers and law professors had preceded me as Brandeis's clerk, and I compared myself unfavorably to them in terms of how I had served the justice; but as several Brandeis biographers have suggested, I also did not share the exalted view of Brandeis most of them held.

I was offered a position with the Securities and Exchange Commission but instead said to the lawyer who had hoped to recruit me that I wanted his help to get a job with a small Boston law firm, where I could learn my way in the law. He found me such a job with Lyne, Woodworth, and Evarts, a firm that defended Metropolitan Life and John Hancock in insurance cases and handled corporate reorganizations.