Brennan, William Joseph, Jr.

Related Category: Supreme Court: Biographies

1906–97, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1956–90), b. Newark, N.J. After receiving his law degree from Harvard, he practiced law in Newark. He served as a New Jersey superior court judge (1949–50), appellate division judge (1950–52), and state supreme court justice (1952–56). In 1956 President Eisenhower appointed him to succeed Sherman Minton on the Supreme Court. Brennan became noted as a supporter of individual liberties and guarantees of justice to the poor. In the last two decades of his long service, he was a liberal stalwart among increasingly conservative colleagues; many of his 1,360 opinions were dissents.