BRANDEIS'S methods inevitably carried him on to the national stage. As
the tentacles of industry, transportation, and finance took hold beyond
state and regional lines, Washington rather than Boston became the center
of his activity. The national spotlight had first fallen on him in 1897 when
he spoke on behalf of consumers amid the jeers of tariff-supporting legis-
lators. But the next time he commanded national attention even the reac-
tionaries applauded. This was in 1908 when he presented to the United
States Supreme Court his brief in Muller v. Oregon, a case involving a state
statute limiting the hours of women in industry. ¹

Brandeis's triumph in the Muller case was truly epoch-making. But the
grounds on which he won his victory were even more important. For the
first time, argument in a Supreme Court case was based not on dead legal
precedents, but on the living facts of industrial America. Brandeis brought
law and life together. Fitting eighteenth-century concepts to twentieth-
century conditions, he made the law grow a hundred years in a day. To
judge that achievement, we don't have to go to the dusty books. We have
only to look about us to see how law (though not by all lawyers) is prac-
ticed today.