William Joseph Brennan Jr. (April 25, 1906 – July 24, 1997) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1956 to 1990.

[3] Born in Newark to Irish immigrant parents, Brennan studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania and then attended Harvard Law School.

William Brennan Sr. had little education and worked as a metal polisher, but rose to a position of leadership, serving as the Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Newark from 1927 to 1930.

Brennan was given a recess appointment as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on October 15, 1956,[14] shortly before the 1956 presidential election, and was sworn into office the following day.

[1] The president's advisers thought the appointment of a Roman Catholic Democrat from the Northeast would woo critical voters in the upcoming re-election campaign for Eisenhower, a Republican.

Brennan was one of two candidates who met Eisenhower's three criteria: experience on lower courts; relative youth and good health; and a Catholic.

The National Liberal League opposed the nomination of a Catholic, thinking he would rely on his religious beliefs rather than the Constitution when ruling,[15] and Senator Joseph McCarthy had read transcripts of Brennan's speech where he decried overzealous anti-Communist investigations as "witch-hunts."

Brennan's role in expanding free speech rights under the First Amendment is particularly notable, as he wrote the Court's opinion in 1964's New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which created constitutional restrictions on the law of libel.

With the departure of moderate Potter Stewart in 1981, the ascension of the most conservative member of the court, William Rehnquist, to the position of Chief Justice, following the retirement of Warren Burger, Brennan found himself more frequently isolated.

[b] That like-mindedness led to both Brennan and Marshall's clerks referring to them as "Justice Brennan-Marshall" in the face of the court's heavy conservative opposition to the two.

[29] Brennan authored three Supreme Court opinions holding that a plaintiff has a cause of action for money damages (compensatory and punitive) arising solely out of an alleged violation of the Bill of Rights.

[34] In Davis v. Passman, Brennan extended this rationale to the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, in a suit for gender discrimination in employment against a former Congressman (Congressional staffers were explicitly excluded from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act).

He authored the sole dissent in Helicopteros Nacionales de Colombia, S. A. v. Hall, defining minimum contacts very broadly for the purposes of general jurisdiction, and influential dissents and partial concurrences in World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson and Asahi Metal Industry Co. v. Superior Court on the subject of specific jurisdiction, holding to a simple "stream-of-commerce" analysis for product liability cases and emphasizing the role of fairness in the Court's analysis of the holding in International Shoe Co. v. Washington.

In Burger King v. Rudzewicz, Brennan authored the majority opinion and extended his broad view of personal jurisdiction to areas of business contracts and franchising.

[citation needed] In his penultimate and final terms on the Court, he wrote the controversial rulings for Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, respectively.

[42] At his retirement, Brennan said the case he thought was most important was Goldberg v. Kelly, which ruled that a local, state or federal government could not terminate welfare payments to a person without a prior individual evidentiary hearing.

In a 1985 speech at Georgetown University, Brennan criticized Attorney General Edwin Meese's call for a "jurisprudence of original intention" as "arrogance cloaked as humility"[44] and advocated reading the U.S. Constitution to protect rights of "human dignity".

Brennan was also less interested in stare decisis or the avoidance of "absolutist" positions where the death penalty was concerned, as he believed that the deliberate taking of human life by the state, as a punishment, was inherently cruel and unusual.

Brennan wrote:[46] Th[e] evidence suggests that death by electrical current is extremely violent and inflicts pain and indignities far beyond the "mere extinguishment of life".

The prisoner often defecates, urinates, and vomits blood and drool.Brennan concluded by stating that electrocution is "nothing less than the contemporary technological equivalent of burning people at the stake."

[48] Although Brennan joined the majority in United States v. O'Brien which upheld the constitutionality of laws banning draft card burning, he later opposed the Vietnam War and dissented several times when the Supreme Court refused to hear challenges to its legality.

"[51] He joined the dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick, which allowed states to prosecute consensual homosexual sodomy, a decision which the Court announced in June 1986.

[54] In November 1996, Brennan fell and broke his hip, and underwent rehabilitation for the injury at a nursing home in Arlington, Virginia, where he died on July 24, 1997, at the age of 91.