The Brandeis Brief was a pioneering legal brief, claimed to have been the first in United States legal history to rely more on a compilation of scientific information and social science than on legal citations.

The Brief is named after Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who presented it in his argument for the 1908 US Supreme Court case, Muller v. Oregon. The Brief was submitted in support of a state law restricting the number of hours women were allowed to work.

The Brandeis Brief consisted of more than 100 pages – only two of which were devoted to legal argument. Are we now in an era of the Brandeis Brief on steroids?

Adam Liptak has an interesting sidebar in The New York Times:

The Supreme Court received more than 80 friend-of-the-court briefs in the Hobby Lobby case. Most of these filings, also called amicus briefs, were dull and repetitive recitations of familiar legal arguments.

Others stood out. They presented fresh, factual information that put the case in a broader context.

The justices are hungry for such data. Their opinions are increasingly studded with citations of facts they learned from amicus briefs.

But this is a perilous trend, said Allison Orr Larsen, a law professor at the College of William and Mary.

“The court is inundated with 11th-hour, untested, advocacy-motivated claims of factual expertise,” she wrote in an article to be published in The Virginia Law Review.

Some of the factual assertions in recent amicus briefs would not pass muster in a high school research paper. But that has not stopped the Supreme Court from relying on them. Recent opinions have cited “facts” from amicus briefs that were backed up by blog posts, emails or nothing at all.

Some amicus briefs are careful and valuable, of course, citing peer-reviewed studies and noting contrary evidence. Others cite more questionable materials.

The full story is here.