The Brennan Center
for Justice
A Bipartisan Champion of Democracy Comes of Age

Beyond the campaign hype, negative advertising and media clutter, the 2008 election campaign may well be influenced by a judicious gamble on expanding democracy made more than a dozen years ago.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University is now a nationally recognized powerhouse for research and activism in the fields of campaign finance and election reform, voting rights and combating special interests in judicial elections. Its efforts, in concert with activist groups throughout the nation, have been felt from city and state legislatures to Congress and in court cases up to the Supreme Court. As a result, the Brennan Center has an impact on a wide range of issues that affect America at the ballot box. Yet it was just a small start-up organization in the mid-1990s.

At its heart is a group of former Supreme Court law clerks so inspired by their mentor that they audaciously chose to eschew the usual retirement mementos that hang on the wall of an ex-Justice’s study. Instead, they passed the hat to create a living memorial to Justice William Brennan’s ideals of standing up for the downtrodden. Even with that daunting goal finally accomplished and the center established in New York, there was no guarantee of long-term sustainability, a concern of all involved, even an aging ex-Justice Brennan.

With a former law clerk serving as its part-time director, the fledgling Brennan Center’s standing was, by all accounts, greatly boosted by one of its first foundation grants. That initial $25,000 grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1996 was followed up by increasingly larger amounts over the years that brought the total Carnegie Corporation investment to $3,650,000.

But as much as providing desperately needed cash inflows, Carnegie Corporation’s grantmaking was used to help leverage other donors. Although the Corporation’s unrestricted funding is set to end next year, the Brennan Center is not now dependent on any single foundation donor. While the outlook for any donor-reliant organization is never certain, the Brennan Center’s firm base at New York University’s law school and wide range of foundation and corporate support speak volumes about its hopes for the future.

Interestingly, the Brennan Center’s stability is at least partly due to a set of seeming contradictions. In an era of increasing specialization, the Brennan Center is a unique hybrid. It doesn’t simply focus on research or outreach like many groups. Nor does the center concentrate just on national issues, but on state and local initiatives as well. There are enough lawyers at the Brennan Center to staff a fair-sized public interest law firm. Yet the Center tries to use litigation as a select tool, rather than a first step.

Many of its lawyers are not fresh out of law school idealists, but seasoned professionals. They possess both experience and prestigious educations that could earn them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, yet they work diligently for a fraction of the going salaries in Manhattan firms.

Brennan Center activities funded by Carnegie Corporation in the past dozen years have focused broadly on areas of promoting democracy. The center engages in other activities, but reducing the influence of money on politics and judges as well as increasing American voters’ access to the political system are areas where the Brennan Center has achieved a significant name in the civic reform community.

Though nonpartisan, the center is generally seen as espousing a progressive or liberal point of view, like its Supreme Court namesake long known as the “Liberal Lion” on the court. Yet it has at times allied itself with strange political bedfellows. Some of the accomplishments the Brennan Center is best known for include helping get current Republican presidential candidate John McCain on the New York State ballot during his 2000 primary run and working with him in the Senate on his landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation.

In another curious example, conservative legal scholar Bruce Fein, who opposes many of the Brennan efforts, nonetheless was willing to lend both his name and write a legal paper for a cause in which he found common ground with the center.

Still, there is no mistaking Brennan’s inspiration. A hallway at the Brennan Center, lined with display cases and photos, is a shrine to the justice who saw himself as the defender of the common man. His black judicial robe with the monogram W J B Jr hangs as a full-length reminder of the long-serving justice, along with his framed nomination to the Supreme Court by Dwight Eisenhower. There are also family and Supreme Court pictures and mementos, interspersed with such Brennan quotes as “The law is not an end to itself…It is preeminently a means to serve what is right.”

But perhaps the most telling example of the Brennan Center’s willingness to defy a conventional label is the fact that it has spent its entire existence working to undo a major Supreme Court opinion issued by the very man it exists to honor. And that effort suited Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. just fine.

Written by: Lee Michael Katz. Katz is a freelance writer with expertise in covering policy issues from his Washington, D.C. area base.