The year 1856 was a vintage year for brilliant Jewish lawyers named Louis. On November 13, 1856, Louis Brandeis was born in Louisville, Kentucky. One month later, on December 14, 1856, Louis Marshall was born in Syracuse, New York. Louis and Louis were both first-generation Americans, born of central European Jewish parents. They both compiled stellar academic records. They both went on to have a profound affect on American law. Both were considered for seats on the U.S. Supreme Court, although only one of them made it.1 And both became eminent leaders in American Jewish life. Yet while both men earned enormous respect within the Jewish and general communities, they never became friends and rarely worked to gether. They differed religiously, philosophically, and politically. They approached Judaism, America, and even the law itself from sharply different perspectives. The parents of Louis Brandeis and Louis Marshall arrived in America at approximately the same time in the middle of the nineteenth century.1 Brandeis' parents hailed from Prague, Marshall's father from Baden and his mother from Wiirttemberg. The two fathers had experienced prejudice and privation in central Europe that precipitated their emigration. Adolph Brandeis, who grew up in an urban area and studied at the Technical