WASHINGTON, July 24 -- Justice William J. Brennan Jr., a towering figure in modern law who embodied the liberal vision of the Constitution as an engine of social and political change, died today, almost exactly seven years after his retirement from the Supreme Court. He was 91.

Justice Brennan had been in failing health for several years. He died at a nursing home in Arlington, Va., where he was undergoing rehabilitation after falling and breaking a hip last November.

The Court on which Justice Brennan was a pivotal force for nearly 34 years was, in many respects, the Brennan Court, although he never served as Chief Justice,

He was the author of numerous landmark opinions and, through his powers of persuasion and force of intellect, the prime mover behind many others. When he did not prevail, his voice in dissent was strong.

Named to the Court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, Justice Brennan, the Newark-born son of Irish immigrants, left a legacy that is visible everywhere in the law and in American politicial and social life. It ranges from the one-person, one-vote doctrine that ended the established order in the nation's legislatures, to the decisions that transformed the Constitution's equal protection guarantee into a weapon against sex discrimination, to cases that opened the Federal courthouse doors to penetrating scrutiny of the quality of justice dispensed at the state and local levels.

The Court and the country had changed around him by the time he retired, after a stroke, at the age of 84 on July 20, 1990. The change has continued in the intervening years, and a notably more conservative Court has modified or overturned several significant Brennan opinions, most recently, last month, when the Court overturned a 1985 decision that had barred public school teachers from giving special remedial classes on the premises of parochial schools.

But Justice Brennan's vision of the Constitution and the role of a Federal judge remained unwavering, and the extent to which his legacy remains intact, indeed deeply knitted into the fabric of modern law, is striking. The 1,360 opinions that bore his name, and numerous others that were marked by his influence, set the high-water mark of an expansive vision of the Constitution and of the transformative power of law.

As Justice Brennan described his vision in a 1987 speech, he believed that the Constitution -- particularly the 14th Amendment's due process clause, which he did more than anyone else to infuse with modern vitality -- existed to guarantee ''the essential dignity and worth of each individual.''

Constitutional interpretation ''demands of judges more than proficiency in logical analysis,'' he said on that occasion, an address to the Bar Association of the City of New York celebrating the Constitution's bicentennial. ''It requires that we be sensitive to the balance of reason and passion that mark a given age, and the ways in which that balance leaves its mark on the everyday exchanges between government and citizen.''

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

''He 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,'' Mr. Clinton said, ''He spent a lifetime upholding those rights and he offered some of the most enduring constitutional decisions of this century.''

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said, ''He played a major role in shaping American constitutional law.''

Justice Brennan's tenure on the Court, spanning eight Presidential Administrations, was extraordinary in both length and dimension. Only five Justices in the Court's history served longer: John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice, who died in office after 34 years; Justices Stephen J. Field and Hugo Black, who both retired after 34 years; the first Justice, John Marshall Harlan, who died in office shortly before the 34-year mark; and Justice William O. Douglas, who retired after a record 36 years. Only Justice Douglas wrote more opinions.

For his first 13 years on the Court, Justice Brennan served under Chief Justice Earl Warren. Commentators on the Warren Court, which dramatically expanded the role of the Federal courts and the Constitution in protecting individual liberties, have identified Justice Brennan as the center of gravity of that Court's liberal majority, ''the catalyst for some of the most significant decisions during his tenure,'' in the words of Bernard Schwartz, a law professor and historian of the Court.

''If we look at Justices in terms of their role in the decision process,'' Professor Schwartz wrote in Judicature Magazine in 1995, Justice Brennan ''was actually the most influential Associate Justice in Supreme Court history.''

The center shifted under Chief Justices Warren E. Burger and Rehnquist; the liberals lost their majority, and Justice Brennan became the spokesman for a wing of the Court that was often outvoted and usually on the defensive. But while he was frequently in dissent, his role on the Court transcended that of an embattled defender of the liberal faith. Term after term, he defied all apparent odds in his ability to pull together majorities, albeit often narrow ones, for sustaining or even advancing the principles that first took root in the Warren era.

Senior Justice, 'Youngest Thinker'

Justice Brennan's final majority opinion for the Court was emblematic. Issued June 27, 1990, the last day of his last term, the opinion in Metro Broadcasting v. Federal Communications Commission, upheld two Federal affirmative-action programs aimed at increasing black ownership of radio and television stations. It had been widely anticipated that the Court would declare the programs unconstitutional, but Justice Brennan managed to find five votes for upholding them. Five years later, a changed Court struck down a separate Federal affirmative-action program and effectively overruled Metro Broadcasting.

To his admirers, the role Justice Brennan assumed in this last phase of his career on the Court embodied the best of the American constitutional system. ''Justice Brennan may be the Supreme Court's senior member, but he is also its youngest thinker,'' the liberal legal scholar Charles A. Reich wrote in the Cardozo Law Review in 1988, when the Justice was 82.

To his detractors, Justice Brennan symbolized all that was wrong with the ''activist judiciary.'' William Bradford Reynolds, the top civil rights official in the Reagan Administration, accused Justice Brennan in 1986 of advocating a ''radical egalitarianism'' that Mr. Reynolds called ''perhaps the major threat to individual liberty'' in the United States.

But when it came to evaluating Justice Brennan's significance on the legal landscape, both sides were in agreement. ''There is no individual in this country, on or off the Court, who has had a more profound and sustained impact upon public policy in the United States for the past 27 years,'' a generally critical article in the conservative journal National Review said in 1984.

There were few areas of the law that did not feel his impact. One of his best-known opinions, New York Times v. Sullivan, reshaped the law of libel. In that 1964 decision, the Court ruled that even when the press publishes false statements about public officials, the First Amendment permits no finding of liability unless the official can show that the statement was deliberately false or published in reckless disregard of the truth.

The First Amendment requires ''breathing space'' for free expression, Justice Brennan wrote, as an element of ''a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.''

Twenty-five years later, Justice Brennan had not wavered in his view of the First Amendment. In Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 decision that found First Amendment protection for the act of burning an American flag as a political protest, Justice Brennan wrote for the 5-to-4 majority: ''If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the Government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.''

But it was his 1970 opinion for the Court in Goldberg v. Kelly, a case little known to the general public, that Justice Brennan appeared to cherish above all others. That decision held that it was a violation of the 14th Amendment's guarantee of due process of law for a state to cut off a welfare recipient's benefits without a hearing.

As a prescription for governmental behavior, the holding in Goldberg v. Kelly appeared modest enough. But the opinion proved to be a watershed of constitutional interpretation, a critical building block in what came to be known as the due process revolution. A series of decisions that followed erected a constitutional shield for the ordinary citizen against the arbitrary or standardless use of governmental power in many contexts.

In the 1987 New York speech, which he entitled ''Reason, Passion, and the Progess of the Law,'' Justice Brennan talked about the importance of the simple requirement that government officials meet a citizen face-to-face before taking adverse action.

''Due process asks whether government has treated someone fairly, whether individual dignity has been honored, whether the worth of an individual has been acknowledged,'' Justice Brennan said. ''If due process values are to be preserved in the bureaucratic state of the late 20th century, it may be essential that officials possess passion -- the passion that puts them in touch with the dreams and disappointments of those with whom they deal, the passion that understands the pulse of life beneath the official version of events.'' His opinion in Goldberg v. Kelly, he said, ''can be seen as injecting passion into a system whose abstract rationality had led it astray.''


Belief in Adapting The Constitution

Justice Brennan was an ardent defender of the view that the essential meaning of the Constitution was to be found in the modern age, and not in a search for the original intentions of its 18th-century framers.

Toward the end of his tenure, that vision placed Justice Brennan sharply at odds with prevailing views in the Reagan Administration, whose top legal officials, principally Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d, believed that the framers' ''original understanding'' was the only legitimate source for constitutional interpretation.

For years, Justice Brennan had refrained from commenting on current political tides. But in a 1985 speech at Georgetown University, he said that the constitutional theory of original intent ''is little more than arrogance cloaked as humility.''

''We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans,'' he said in that speech. ''The genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs.''

Integral to Justice Brennan's constitutional vision was the notion that individuals should have the greatest access possible to the Federal courts. He wrote the opinion in a 1963 case, Fay v. Noia, which greatly expanded the extent to which the Federal courts could hear habeas corpus petitions challenging state criminal convictions. That decision has been whittled away, both by Congressional amendments to the Federal habeas corpus statute and by subsequent Supreme Court interpretations of that statute.

One of Justice Brennan's enduring landmark opinions, the 1962 decisions in Baker v. Carr, which led directly to the one-person, one-vote reapportionment cases, was in essence a case concerning access to the Federal courts. Baker v. Carr held that cases challenging unequal legislative apportionment could be heard in Federal court. Prior to that decision, the courts had labeled such cases ''political questions,'' and refused to hear them at all.

Chief Justice Warren later called Baker v. Carr ''the most important case that we decided in my time.'' Rex E. Lee, who served as Solicitor General in the Reagan Administration, went further in a 1991 forum sponsored by the American Bar Association. ''As you look back, Baker perhaps had a greater effect on the distribution of power within our country than any other opinion that's ever been handed down,'' Mr. Lee said.

Justice Brennan's opinion drew a bitter dissent from Justice Felix Frankfurter, his former professor at Harvard Law School. Justice Frankfurter once made the ironic comment, ''I always wanted my students to think for themselves, but Brennan goes too far.''

Among many other Brennan opinions that opened the Federal courthouse doors was Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, in 1971, which for the first time recognized a right to sue a Government official directly under the Constitution. Another wasMonell v. New York City Department of Social Services, in 1978, which opened local governments to suits under a 1871 civil rights statute for violating an individual's constitutional rights.

Leader in Decisions Expanding Rights

In a series of decisions from 1961 to 1969, Justice Brennan led the Court in a quiet revolution that made provisions of the Bill of Rights -- a document that speaks only of the Federal Government -- applicable to the states. He wrote only one of the decisions, Malloy v. Hogan in 1964, which made the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination applicable to the states, but he played a behind-the-scenes role in the other cases.

Justice Brennan joined the Court in the immediate shadow of the 1954 landmark school desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education. There was still much work to be done to end the regime of segregation. Justice Brennan wrote several opinions that were crucial in carrying out the principles of the Brown decision, including Keyes v. School District No. 1 of Denver, which in 1973 applied the Brown ruling to a Northern school district for the first time.

Justice Brennan wrote the opinion for the Court in Katzenbach v. Morgan, a major 1965 ruling that affirmed the authority of Congress to use the 14th Amendment as ''a positive grant of legislative power,'' providing a basis for expansive Congressional power involving civil rights.

He took the lead in applying the 14th Amendment's equal protection guarantee to strike down official discrimination on the basis of gender as well as race. In two opinions in the mid-1970's, Frontiero v. Richardson and Craig v. Boren, Justice Brennan defined a heightened level of constitutional scrutiny that laws making distinctions on the basis of gender would have to withstand in order to survive a 14th Amendment challenge.

Later, Justice Brennan was a strong defender of the use of affirmative-action programs that gave special opportunities to blacks even at the expense of some whites. In a 1979 opinion, United Steelworkers v. Weber, he rejected the argument that a special training program aimed at helping black workers violated the rights of white workers under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

''It would be ironic indeed,'' he wrote in the Weber case, ''if a law triggered by a nation's concern over centuries of racial injustice and intended to improve the lot of those who had been excluded from the American dream for so long, constituted the first legislative prohibition of all voluntary, private, race-conscious efforts to abolish traditional patterns of racial segregation and hierarchy.''

Several years later, the Reagan Administration began using the courts to try to establish the principle that only those blacks who had been direct victims of discrimination should be allowed to benefit from affirmative-action programs. Justice Brennan mustered Court majorities that rejected the Administration's arguments and permitted the continued use of the affirmative-action concept.

Throughout his tenure, Justice Brennan was a firm supporter of the constitutional right to free choice on questions of contraception and abortion. His 1972 opinion in Eisenstadt v. Baird established the right of unmarried people to receive information about birth control. Justice Brennan wrote that if ''the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwanted governmental intrusions into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as whether to bear or beget a child.'' As constitutional doctrine, the opinion contributed significantly to the Court's later abortion decisions.

Justice Brennan also believed that the Constitution required strict separation of church and state. Asked in a 1986 interview to name his hardest case, he cited his concurring opinion in the 1963 Schempp case, one of the early decisions prohibiting organized prayer in the public schools.

''In the face of my whole lifelong experience as a Roman Catholic,'' he said in the interview, ''to say that prayer was not an appropriate thing in public schools, that gave me quite a hard time. I struggled.'' But he added that at the moment he joined the Court, ''I had settled in my mind that I had an obligation under the Constitution which could not be influenced by any of my religious principles.''

In 1987 he wrote the majority opinion in Edwards v. Aguillard, declaring unconstitutional a Louisiana law that required the teaching of ''creation science.'' The law was a device to advance the teaching of religious views, he said, and as such amounted to an unconstitutional ''establishment'' of religion. His opinion explained the reason for his strictly separationist view.

''Families entrust public schools with the education of their children,'' he said, ''but condition their trust on the understanding that the classroom will not purposely be used to advance religious views that may conflict with the private beliefs of the student and his or her family. Students in such institutions are impressionable and their attendance is involuntary.''

Time after time, Justice Brennan achieved results that defied predictions, putting together unlikely coalitions or finding compromises when there appeared little room for common ground.

Adversaries Treated With Respect

Commentators attributed his success to an unusual combination of a forceful intellect and personal magnetism. Perhaps drawing on skills he had learned early in his career as a labor lawyer, he was an excellent negotiator who treated his ideological opponents with respect and who never forgot that adversaries of the moment could prove to be allies in the next battle.

In a 1981 essay, Abraham D. Sofaer, a former law clerk of Justice Brennan's who was then a Federal District judge, wrote, ''Justice Brennan's great success on and off the Court has been achieved because he is an ebullient, generous, charismatic human being.'' Judge Sofaer continued: ''My point is not that Justice Brennan has always been right. Rather, it is that the human qualities of the man have placed him at a formidable advantage in any dispute over the wisdom and propriety of his decisions.''

Milton Katz, a Harvard Law School professor and longtime friend, recalled in a 1981 essay that he once teased Justice Brennan about some telling points that Justice Rehnquist had scored in a dissenting opinion. Professor Katz said Justice Brennan ''grinned in ungrudging admiration'' of his adversary and exclaimed, ''Wasn't Rehnquist good!''

Under the Supreme Court's rules, the Chief Justice has the right to assign the opinion in any case in which he is in the majority; when the Chief Justice is in dissent, the power falls to the senior Justice in the majority. When the Court was ideologically divided, that power often fell to Justice Brennan. He assigned himself a number of major opinions each term and placed other opinions strategically among his allies. Always willing to curb his own advocacy a bit to persuade an indecisive colleague or hold a wavering majority, he was more committed to winning than to having the final product reflect every nuance or preference of his own.

Failed to Persuade On the Death Penalty

One subject on which his powers of persuasion failed was capital punishment. Justice Brennan believed strongly that the death penalty was unconstitutional in all circumstances, a view shared among his colleagues only by Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Neither he nor Justice Marshall ever reconciled themselves to the Court's opinions permitting the continued use of the death penalty. The two men dissented every time the Court turned down an appeal from a death-row inmate, an event that occurred with increasing frequency in Justice Brennan's final years on the Court. After both Justices had retired, Justice Harry A. Blackmun adopted the same practice, shortly before his own retirement in 1994.

Sometimes Justice Brennan dissented at length. More often he simply noted his dissent, adding that he was ''adhering to my view that the death penalty is in all circumstances cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the 8th and 14th Amendments.''

He believed that his position would ultimately be vindicated by a changed political consensus, although he acknowledged that this was unlikely in his lifetime. He told an audience at Georgetown University in 1985, ''On this issue, I hope to embody a community striving for human dignity for all, although perhaps not yet arrived.''

He used one of his last public appearances, in April 1996, to denounce the death penalty as a ''barbaric and inhuman punishment that violates our Constitution.'' The statement was read for him by his son, William J. Brennan 3d, in a ceremony at the Court marking the Justice's 90th birthday.

Justice Brennan, who began his judicial career on the state courts of New Jersey, never lost his interest in state constitutions and the workings of state judicial systems. He was an influential figure among state court judges. An article he wrote in a 1977 issue of the Harvard Law Review entitled ''State Constitutions and the Protection of Individual Rights'' urged state supreme court judges to look to their own state constitutions as sources of protection for individual rights at a time when the United States Supreme Court appeared to be cutting back on such protections.

The article became one of the most frequently cited law review articles in history, and the results were apparent in a rapidly growing number of state supreme court rulings that relied on state constitutions to expand individual rights.

''This one law review article, almost by itself, created the renaissance of state constitutionalism,'' a 1986 appraisal in the John Marshall Law Review concluded. There was an irony to Justice Brennan's role as a champion of state constitutions, because as a matter of Federal constitutional law he strongly opposed efforts, both on and off the Court, to enhance the powers of the state vis a vis the national Government.

Achieved Expectations Of His Father

William Joseph Brennan Jr. was born April 25, 1906 in Newark, the second of eight children of William Brennan and the former Agnes McDermott.. His parents met and married in the United States after immigrating separately from County Roscommon in Ireland.

His father, a metal polisher and brewery worker in Ireland, became active in the trade union movement and in New Jersey Democratic politics. He was a member of the Essex County Trades and Labor Council and served as Commissioner of Public Safety in Newark from 1917 until 1930, when he died at age 57.

''Everything I am, I am because of my father,'' Justice Brennan told an interviewer in 1986. Asked whether his father would be surprised to find him on the Supreme Court, Justice Brennan replied: ''No, he would have expected it.''

William Jr. attended both parochial and public elementary schools. He graduated from Barringer High School. In 1928, he graduated with honors from the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania.

At the age of 21, shortly before graduation, he married Marjorie Leonard, whom he had met when he was a sophomore in high school. They had three children: William 3d, a lawyer in Princeton and former president of the New Jersey Bar Association; Hugh, an administrator at the United States Department of Commerce, and Nancy, a museum curator and administrator in Bermuda.

With his new wife staying behind in New Jersey to earn money for his tuition, he entered Harvard Law School and was among the top students in the class when he graduated in 1931. A scholarship enabled him to continue his studies after his father died at the end of his second year in law school. Returning to his home state to practice law, he was admitted t o the New Jersey bar and began working at one of the state's top law firms, Pitney, Hardin & Skinner. He was a trial lawyer specializing in representing management in labor cases.

He joined the Army in 1942 as a major assigned to the legal division of the Ordnance Department. He won the Legion of Merit and was discharged with the rank of colonel. Upon his return to law practice, his firm changed its name to Pitney, Hardin & Brennan. Mr. Brennan became one of the better-known lawyers in the state, not only for his wide-ranging practice but also for his active involvement in the court reform movement that replaced New Jersey's antiquated constitution and legal system with one that was generally considered one of the country's best.

Although he was enrolled as a Democrat, his public activities were apolitical. New Jersey's Republican Governor, Alfred E. Driscoll, asked him to become a judge on the state's Superior Court in 1949. To the surprise of nearly all his professional colleagues, Mr. Brennan gave up his lucrative practice for the unglamorous life of a local trial judge.

A Republican President, A Democratic Justice

The next year, he was elevated to the Appellate Division. By 1952, when Governor Driscoll named him to the state's Supreme Court, he was highly regarded for the many procedural changes he had made to improve the flow of cases in the New Jersey courts. He had become a protege of Arthur Vanderbilt, New Jersey's Chief Justice, who was a leader in the national effort to modernize the courts. A speech Justice Brennan gave in May 1956 to a conference on court congestion and delay, held in Washington at the Department of Justice, brought him to the attention of the Eisenhower Administration.

In September 1956, Attorney General Herbert Brownell telephoned him to ask him to come to Washington to see President Eisenhower. The call came to Justice Brennan's chambers in Red Bank, N.J., late on a Friday afternoon, and he took an overnight train to Washington, arriving at about 5:30 Saturday morning.

Justice Brennan later told his biographer, Stephen J. Wermiel, that he assumed he was being invited to head a group on court administration, a position he did not want. He was surprised to find the Attorney General waiting for him at the station in Washington, and flabbergasted when Mr. Brownell informed him that President Eisenhower, a Republican, wanted to name him to the Supreme Court. Justice Sherman Minton had just announced that he would retire because of poor health. No Catholic had served on the Court since Justice Frank Murphy died in 1949, and with the 1956 Presidential election only weeks away, President Eisenhower's advisers believed that the appointment of a northeastern Catholic would be beneficial.

''Brennan fulfilled the specific purposes for which he was chosen,'' Professor Wermiel wrote in a 1993 account of the nomination. ''He was a Democrat, a Catholic, and a state court judge; he was comparatively young for a Supreme Court nominee; and he remained committed to reform efforts to reduce delays and backlogs in the nation's courts.'' The 50-year-old state judge was widely regarded as one of the most impressive young judges in the country, and the nomination was hailed in both the popular press and legal commentaries as an example of nonpartisan merit selection at its best. Life magazine said the nominee ''brings to the Court one of the keenest, quickest judicial minds in the country.''

Because Congress was in recess, Justice Brennan was able to take his seat immediately, on Oct. 16, 1956. At his confirmation hearing, in February 1957, he received hostile questioning only from Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, who cast the only vote opposing his confirmation.

Although President Eisenhower was widely quoted as describing his selection of Justice Brennan as one of his two biggest mistakes -- the other being his nomination of Earl Warren as Chief Justice -- the evidence that he actually ever made such a remark is equivocal. Professor Wermiel said, ''It is difficult to see how the men around President Eisenhower could have missed Brennan's liberalism.''

In any event, the selection process focused on the politics of the moment and paid scarcely any attention to his views on constitutional issues. ''The inescapable conclusion is that Eisenhower got precisely the political result for which he was searching'' when he chose Justice Brennan, Professor Wermiel wrote.

Justice Brennan had several health problems in his later years. He appeared particularly dispirited in 1979, when he told some of his former law clerks that he was considering retiring. He had recently suffered a small stroke and undergone surgery for a cancerous tumor on a vocal cord. His wife had suffered from cancer for several years.

But he decided to remain on the Court. He nursed his wife until she died in late 1982. Three months later, Justice Brennan married Mary Fowler, who had worked at the Supreme Court for 40 years and had been his secretary for 26 . The marriage appeared to reinvigorate him. He resumed an active travel schedule and tackled his work at the Court with renewed energy and determination. His wife survives him, as do the three children of his first marriage, as well as seven grandchildren and a great-grandchild.

The Court said today that Justice Brennan's body would lie in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court Building from 10:30 A.M. to 10 P.M. on Monday for public viewing. The funeral will be on Tuesday at St. Matthew's Cathedral here with burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Justice Brennan had no intention of retiring when the Court's 1989-90 term ended. He and his wife were on their way to a Scandinavian cruise shortly after the Court began its summer recess when he suffered a second minor stroke. The couple completed the cruise. But Justice Brennan's doctor then advised him that he faced the prospect of a major, disabling stroke unless he retired.

In a public statement he issued with his official retirement announcement, Justice Brennan said: ''It is my hope that the Court during my years of service has built a legacy of interpreting the Constitution and Federal laws to make them responsive to the needs of the people whom they were intended to benefit and protect. This legacy can and will withstand the test of time.''

To fill Justice Brennan's seat, President George Bush named David H. Souter, a Federal appeals court judge from New Hampshire. Despite their considerable differences in outlook -- Justice Souter is a Republican of more conservative leanings -- the two men developed a warm friendship, and Justice Souter has often expressed deep admiration for his predecessor.

In 1995, Justice Brennan's former law clerks honored him by endowing the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, a nonpartisan litigation and research center. At a ceremony at the Court marking the opening of the Brennan Center, Abner J. Mikva, a former Federal appeals court judge who was then the White House counsel, declared that he was coining a new word, ''Brennanist,'' which he defined as, ''one who influences his colleagues beyond measure.''