Today marks the 150th birthday of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.  He was not only one of the great American legal thinkers, but also one of the most influential proponents of using information about the reality of people’s lives to drive legal analysis.  Brandeis was at the forefront of the movement to bring empirical research into the law, and in many ways all of us here at Credit Slips are working in the tradition he helped create.  Adam Cohen published a very nice piece in the New York Times today about Brandeis’ life and his “insistence on injecting facts and real-world analysis into the law.”  It is well worth reading.