William O. Douglas
William Orville Douglas was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1939 to 1975. Douglas was known for his strong progressive and civil libertarian views and is often cited as the most liberal justice in the U.S. Supreme Court’s history. Nominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, Douglas was confirmed at the age of 40, becoming one of the youngest justices appointed to the court. He is the longest-serving justice in history, having served for 36 years and 209 days.
After an itinerant childhood, Douglas attended Whitman College on a scholarship. He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1925 and joined the Yale Law School faculty. After serving as the third chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Douglas was successfully nominated to the Supreme Court in 1939, succeeding Justice Louis Brandeis. He was among those seriously considered for the 1944 Democratic vice presidential nomination and was subject to an unsuccessful draft movement prior to the 1948 U.S. presidential election. Douglas served on the Court until his retirement in 1975 and was succeeded by John Paul Stevens. Douglas holds a number of records as a Supreme Court justice, including the most opinions.
One of Douglas's most notable opinions was Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the constitutional right to privacy and was foundational to later cases such as Eisenstadt v. Baird, Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges. His other notable opinions included Skinner v. Oklahoma, United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., Terminiello v. City of Chicago, Brady v. Maryland, and Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections. Douglas joined the unanimous opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in American public schools. He wrote notable concurring or dissenting opinions in Dennis v. United States, United States v. O’Brien, Terry v. Ohio, and Brandenburg v. Ohio. He was a strong opponent of the Vietnam War and an ardent advocate of environmentalism.
Early life and education
Douglas was born in 1898 in Maine Township, Otter Tail County, Minnesota, to William Douglas and Julia Bickford Fisk. Douglas's father was a Scottish itinerant Presbyterian minister from Pictou County, Nova Scotia. The family first moved to California and then to Cleveland, Washington. Douglas said he suffered from an illness at age two that he described as polio, although a biographer reveals that it was intestinal colic. His mother attributed his recovery to a miracle, telling Douglas that one day he would be President of the United States.His father died in Portland, Oregon in 1904, when Douglas was six years old. Douglas later claimed his mother had been left destitute. After moving the family from town to town in the West, his mother, with three young children, settled in Yakima, Washington. William, like the rest of the Douglas family, did odd jobs to earn extra money, and a college education appeared to be unaffordable. He was the valedictorian at Yakima High School and did well enough in school to earn a full academic scholarship to attend Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.
At Whitman, Douglas became a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity. He worked at various jobs while attending school, including as a waiter and janitor during the school year, and at a cherry orchard in the summer. Picking cherries, Douglas would say later, inspired him to pursue a legal career. He once said of his early interest in the law:
Douglas was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, participated on the debate team, and was elected as student body president in his final year. After graduating in 1920 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and economics, he taught English and Latin at his old high school for the next two years, hoping to earn enough to attend law school. "Finally," he said, "I decided it was impossible to save enough money by teaching and I said to hell with it."
Military service
In the summer of 1918, Douglas took part in a U.S. Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps training encampment at the Presidio of San Francisco. That fall, he joined the Student Army Training Corps at Whitman as a private. He served from October to December, and was honorably discharged because the Armistice of November 11, 1918 ended the war and the army's requirements for more soldiers and officers.Law school
He traveled by train from Yakima to New York in 1922, taking a job tending sheep on a Chicago-bound train, in return for free passage, with hopes to attend the Columbia Law School. Douglas drew on his Beta Theta Pi membership to help him survive in New York, as he stayed at one of its houses and was able to borrow $75 from a fraternity brother from Washington, enough to enroll at Columbia. Six months later, Douglas's funds were running out. The appointments office at the law school told him that a New York firm wanted a student to help prepare a correspondence course in law. Douglas earned $600 for his work, enabling him to stay in school. Hired for similar projects, he saved $1,000 by semester's end. In August 1923, Douglas traveled to La Grande, Oregon, to marry Mildred Riddle, whom he had known in Yakima. Douglas graduated from Columbia in 1925 with a Bachelor of Laws degree, ranked second in his class.During the summer of 1925, Douglas started work at the firm of Cravath, DeGersdorff, Swaine and Wood after failing to obtain a Supreme Court clerkship with Harlan F. Stone. Douglas was hired at Cravath by attorney John J. McCloy, who later became the chairman of the Board of Chase Manhattan Bank.
Yale Law School
Douglas quit Cravath after four months. After one year, he moved back to Yakima but soon regretted the move and never practiced law in Washington. After a period of unemployment and another months-long stint at Cravath, he started teaching at Columbia Law School. In 1928, he joined the faculty of Yale Law School, where he became an expert on commercial litigation and bankruptcy law. He was identified with the legal realist movement, which pushed for an understanding of law based less on formalistic legal doctrines and more on the real-world effects of the law. Teaching at Yale, he and his fellow professor Thurman Arnold were riding the New Haven Railroad and were inspired to set the sign Passengers will please refrain... to Antonín Dvořák's Humoresque #7. Robert Maynard Hutchins described Douglas as "the most outstanding law professor in the nation." When Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago, Douglas accepted an offer to move there, but he changed his mind after he was made a Sterling Professor at Yale.Securities and Exchange Commission
In 1934, Douglas left Yale after President Franklin Roosevelt nominated him to the Securities and Exchange Commission. By 1937, he had become an adviser and friend to the President and the chairman. That same year, Roosevelt promoted him to Chairman of the SEC, replacing James M. Landis. He also became friends with a group of young New Dealers, including Tommy "The Cork" Corcoran and Abraham Fortas. He was also close, both socially and in thinking to the Progressives of the era, such as Philip and Robert La Follette Jr. That social/political group befriended Lyndon Johnson, a freshman representative from the 10th District of Texas. In his 1982 book The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, Robert Caro wrote that in 1937, Douglas had helped to persuade Roosevelt to authorize the Marshall Ford Dam, a controversial project whose approval enabled Johnson to consolidate his power as a representative.Supreme Court
In 1939, Justice Louis D. Brandeis retired from the Court, and on March 20 Roosevelt nominated Douglas as his replacement. Douglas was Brandeis's personal choice to be his successor. Douglas later revealed that his appointment had been a great surprise to him, and Douglas feared that he would be named as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on April 4 by a vote of 62 to 4. The four negative votes were all cast by Republicans: Lynn J. Frazier, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Gerald P. Nye, and Clyde M. Reed. Douglas was sworn into office on April 17, 1939, becoming, at age 40, the fifth-youngest justice to be confirmed to the Supreme Court.Relationships with others at Supreme Court
Douglas was often at odds with fellow justice Felix Frankfurter, who believed in judicial restraint and thought the court should stay out of politics. Douglas did not highly value judicial consistency or stare decisis when deciding cases. "But the origin of Douglas and Frankfurter's deep-seated animosity went beyond important jurisprudential differences. Temperamentally, they were opposites. From the beginning of their close associations as justices, the two men simply grated on each other's nerves.... Although in 1974 Douglas claimed that there had been no 'war' between him and Frankfurter, the evidence to the contrary was overwhelming. Frankfurter and Douglas, two important American jurists whose decades-long bitter debates contributed a great deal to our understanding of constitutionalism in a modern society, could not tolerate each other. Intentionally and unintentionally, they went out of their way to harass each other for over two decades."Judge Richard A. Posner, who was a law clerk for justice William J. Brennan Jr. during the latter part of Douglas's tenure, characterized Douglas as "a bored, distracted, uncollegial, irresponsible" Supreme Court justice, as well as "rude, ice-cold, hot-tempered, ungrateful, foul-mouthed, self-absorbed" and so abusive in "treatment of his staff to the point where his law clerks—whom he described as 'the lowest form of human life'—took to calling him "shithead" behind his back." Posner asserts also that "Douglas's judicial oeuvre is slipshod and slapdash," but Douglas's "intelligence, his energy, his academic and government experience, his flair for writing, the leadership skills that he had displayed at the SEC, and his ability to charm when he bothered to try" could have let him "become the greatest justice in history." Brennan once stated that Douglas was one of only "two geniuses" he had met in his life.