BRENNAN, FORCEFUL EX-JUSTICE, DIES AT 91.

Byline: Mark Feeney The Boston Globe

William J. Brennan Jr., a lion of liberalism and one of the most influential justices in the history of the Supreme Court, died Thursday in Manor Care nursing home in Arlington, Va. He was 91.

At the White House, President Clinton said Justice Brennan's ``devotion to the Bill of Rights inspired millions of Americans, and countless young law students, including myself.''

Brennan, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Clinton, ``once said the role of the Constitution is the protection of the dignity of every human being, and he recognized that every individual has fundamental human rights that government cannot deny,'' Clinton said. ``He spent a lifetime upholding those rights, and he offered some of the most enduring constitutional decisions of this century.''

Brennan, who was appointed by President Eisenhower in 1956, served on the Supreme Court for nearly 34 years, a tenure exceeded by that of only five other justices. While his length of service was impressive, even critics acknowledged his impact on the court and the nation was far more significant.

Brennan was barely known to the general public. A survey by the National Law Journal in 1990, the year he retired, found that only 3 percent of Americans recognized his name. But his influence as leader of the court's liberal wing for three decades made him one of the key figures of postwar U.S. history.

George F. Will, no admirer of the justice's brand of judicial activism, went so far as to write in a 1994 column that Brennan, having been ``the court's most important member'' during much of his time on the bench, was ``the nation's most important political leader'' in that period.

Brennan served under three chief justices: Earl Warren, Warren Burger and William Rehnquist. On the Warren Court, a bastion of judicial activism, he was the chief justice's closest ally. A 1983 Michigan Law Review article suggested that the Warren Court might more accurately be described as the Brennan Court.

Under Burger, Brennan strove to blunt the chief justice's conservative aims. Brennan met with often-startling success as he worked to extend and sometimes even expand the achievements of the Warren Court.

Under Rehnquist, Brennan increasingly found himself reduced to writing dissents, although he retained enough of his celebrated gift for coalition-building to inspire the occasional liberal victory, as in the 5-4 decisions of Texas vs. Johnson and U.S. vs. Eichman, which invalidated flag-burning laws.

Critics of Brennan argued that his devotion to individual rights and the equal-protection clause of the Constitution often led him to emphasize policy goals at the expense of legal reasoning, thus encouraging the court to act in an inappropriate, legislative manner.

Writing in 1986, Brennan replied that critics, accusing him of violating the original intent of the founders and rejecting a strict construction of the Constitution, displayed ``little more than arrogance cloaked in humility.'' He saw the Bill of Rights and the 14th and 15th Amendments as the heart of the Constitution that he called ``a sparkling vision of the supremacy of the human dignity of every individual.'' The court's first obligation is to regard that vision as ``transcendent, beyond the reach of temporary political majorities,'' he wrote.

Yet to him transcendence was not static. ``Current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can - as 20th century Americans. . . . The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone,'' he wrote, ``but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and needs.''

William Joseph Brennan Jr. was born in Newark, N.J. - the second of eight children of Irish immigrants. His father, who had once worked shoveling coal, was an American Federation of Labor organizer and later Newark's commissioner of public safety.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1928, Brennan entered Harvard Law School. His father's unexpected death strained family finances during the Depression, and he had to support his legal education through scholarships and income from odd jobs.

After graduating from law school, Brennan joined a Newark firm and specialized in labor law. He served as a colonel in the Army during World War II. He developed a lucrative corporate practice after the war, and it was with little enthusiasm that he agreed to become a state judge in 1949. He found that he enjoyed being on the bench. Within three years he rose to a seat on New Jersey's highest state court.

Four years later, an unlikely train of circumstances elevated Brennan to the highest court in the land.

In April 1956, New Jersey's chief justice was scheduled to attend a conference on court congestion. Falling ill, he asked Brennan to take his place. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, who considered congestion the leading problem of the day, attended the conference and was greatly impressed by Brennan, noted for keeping his docket unclogged. ``We might find something for this guy,'' Brownell remarked.

Five months later, Justice Sherman Minton resigned. After nominating John Marshall Harlan in 1953, Eisenhower had told associates his next court appointment would go to a Catholic, which Brennan was. Brennan was also a Democrat from a swing state in a presidential election year. Even better, he was a Democrat who could honestly say he hadn't voted for either Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee, in 1952. Brennan had just moved and so wasn't eligible to vote at election time.

Finally, the Association of State Court Judges had long urged that one of its members be on the high court, and so a Republican president came to nominate one of the century's most liberal justices.

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Photo: William J. Brennan Jr.

Championed individual rights