Justice William O. Douglas
Today’s Justice of the Day is: WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS. Justice Douglas was born on this day, October 16, in 1898.
Justice Douglas was born in Maine, Minnesota, but was raised in Yakima, Washington. He was an avid hiker in his youth (and even well into his later years), a hobby that supposedly arose out of an attempt to regain his legs’ strength after a brush with Polio, a fact that is often cited to explain his lifelong love of the environment. Justice Douglas attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, earning an A.B. in 1920, and later earned an LL.B. from Columbia Law School in 1925.
Immediately after graduating from law school, Justice Douglas began a one-year stint in private practice in New York City, before returning to his law school alma mater to become an Assistant Professor of Law from 1926 to 1928. In 1928, he became the Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he would serve until 1936, the year before he took office as a Commissioner of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. During his time at Yale, Justice Douglas also served as Director of the Protective Study Committee of the SEC (from 1934 to 1936). Justice Douglas became the Chairman of the SEC in 1937, where he would remain until his appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Justice Douglas was nominated from the state of Connecticut by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 20, 1939, to a seat vacated by Justice Louis Brandeis. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on April 4, and received his commission on April 15. Justice Douglas took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on April 17, was appointed from the state of Connecticut, and served on the Hughes, Stone, Vinson, Warren, and Burger Courts. He assumed senior status on November 12, 1975, and his service was terminated on January 19, 1980, due to his death.
To this day, Justice Douglas remains widely recognized as one of the most ideologically committed (if sometimes ineffective) liberals to ever serve on the SCUS. His is also the longest tenure of any Member of the SCUS, and he wrote more opinions for the Court than any other Justice in history. It is often said that Justice Douglas’ roots in a small, isolated town in the then-sparsely populated West imbued him with a deep belief in the right to be left alone. This worldview is reflected in his judicial decision-making by his unwavering commitment to the right to privacy, as perhaps best demonstrated by his opinion for the Court in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). Justice Douglas’ ruling in Griswold, along with his decision to join a unanimous Court in striking down laws that mandated disparate treatment for men and women on the basis of gender in Reed v. Reed (1971), was part of a long and notable advocacy for gender equality that marked his time at the SCUS (which also included his hiring of the Court’s first female Law Clerk in 1944). His record on civil liberties and equality was hardly perfect, as seen when he decided to join the profoundly unjust Opinion of the Court in Korematsu v. U.S. (1944). Justice Douglas earned himself the moniker “Wild Bill,” and not for no reason; he had more marriages and impeachment attempts than any other Justice in history. Whatever one wishes to make of his personal life or overall service on the bench, there are few who would deny that he was, in the words of a Time Magazine article published soon after his retirement, “the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to” serve on the SCUS.