What the First Senate Hearing for a Supreme Court Nominee Shows about Today’s Confirmation Process

Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination, and the possibility of another contentious Senate confirmation hearing, evoke the first time the Senate ever held such a hearing, a little over a century ago—when President Woodrow Wilson nominated, in the same election year in which he was running for a second term, a jurist who belonged to one of America’s religious minorities, and whose views were thought incompatible with the conventional opinions shared by the Washington establishment. That nominee would go on to become the first Jewish justice to sit on the Supreme Court.

For the first 142 years of our history, there were no hearings on Supreme Court nominations. Presidents simply sent their names to the Senate, which considered the nominations privately and then voted on them. Such review was hardly pro forma—the Senate rejected nominees of Presidents James Madison, John Tyler, James Polk, James Buchanan, Ulysses Grant, and Grover Cleveland (twice). But there were no public proceedings—until 1916.

In that year, President Wilson nominated Louis D. Brandeis, widely known as “The People’s Lawyer” for his lawsuits and other actions against powerful economic interests. Brandeis had a stellar legal resume. He entered Harvard Law School at age eighteen, earned the highest grades in the school’s history, and graduated in two years. At the age of thirty-two, he argued his first case before the Supreme Court. In the following decades, he became one of the most successful lawyers in the nation, while engaging in many public-interest representations.