Unemployment: a love story

A record-shattering 22 million Americans filed for unemployment insurance in recent weeks.

Nobody wants to be in this position. Nobody wants that record.

I think that’s why I paid close attention this weekend to a story about about the two lawyers who were basically the mother and father of unemployment insurance in the United States.

It's an interesting tale. It's also a bit of a love story.

‘Brainy and shy; handsome and outgoing’

It starts almost a century ago, when a young prospective law student named Elizabeth Brandeis ("E.B" to her friends), had her heart set on Harvard.

Little problem: Harvard refused to admit women to its law school in the 1920s.

They wouldn't even make an exception for E.B., whose father was Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (a Harvard man himself).

Instead, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin law school in 1923. There, she met her future husband, a fellow student named Paul Raushenbush.

“She was brainy and shy, her hair long and dark,” as Michael S. Rose…