Politics & Power Quote by Louis D. Brandeis

A government that breaks its own rules doesn’t just commit a discrete offense; it rewires the public’s moral circuitry. Brandeis frames law as a contagious practice, not a static code. The state is the largest classroom in the room, and its curriculum is behavior. When officials cut corners, ignore warrants, or treat “emergency” as a permanent exemption, the lesson absorbed by ordinary people isn’t legal nuance - it’s that legality is optional for those with leverage.

The intent here is prosecutorial in the best sense: to put the state itself on trial. Brandeis isn’t romanticizing rebellion; he’s warning that cynicism is a rational response to hypocrisy. “Breeds contempt” is the key verb: contempt isn’t ignorance, it’s an earned disgust. Once citizens believe enforcement is selective and rule-breaking is rewarded, compliance stops feeling like civic virtue and starts feeling like sucker behavior. At that point, private actors imitate the sovereign. If the government can be “a law unto himself,” why shouldn’t anyone else?

The subtext is a rebuke of the seductive argument that good ends justify dirty means. Brandeis, a Supreme Court justice famous for his civil-liberties views and his suspicion of concentrated power, wrote in an era when policing, surveillance, and anti-radical crackdowns were expanding under the banner of public safety. His line about “invites anarchy” is deliberately ironic: the state claims it must bend the law to prevent chaos, yet lawless governance is the very engine that manufactures chaos. The warning lands because it names legitimacy as the fragile resource modern states can’t print.