As noted, I'm geeking out a bit with this one, but bear with me. A familiar hero to lawyers on the left, the man left a thumbprint on American history of the 20th century so deep that many of his innovations probably feel too fundamental to be so recent. The concept of "one person, one vote"---although commonly misquoted, Brennan knew even in the 1960s better than to phrase it "one man one vote"---comes from his opinion in Baker v. Carr. The notion that pornography can enjoy First Amendment protection stems from Roth v. U.S., when Brennan articulated the (I believe current?) standard but upheld the appealed conviction anyway. The much-misused concept of an unconstitutional "chilling effect" is Brennan's coinage. And he wrote the majority opinion in New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark case striking down an Alabama slander lawsuit against the Times for daring to allege that Alabama police officials---Bull Connor was not a party for reasons I can't recall---just might be persecuting Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights activists. You probably have to be a lawyer to know the phrase "actual malice," but that one comes to us courtesy Justice Brennan, too.
Like I said, an awful lot of the history written by this man feels too fundamental to be of such recent vintage, but that's how it happened. Tellingly, all the history to his credit is from that slice of the Twentieth Century when history became more decent, more humane.
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