William O. Douglas

Associate Justice

• Born: October 16, 1898
• Birthplace: Maine, Minnesota
• Died: January 19, 1980
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

Associate justice of the United States (1939-1975)

As the longest-serving justice in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, Douglas was reputed as an outspoken advocate of civil rights and liberties during his thirty-six years on the Court. In particular, he played a critical role in establishing a constitutional right to privacy and developing broad protections for freedom of speech.

Area of achievement Law

Early Life

William O. Douglas, the son of a minister, was born in the small town of Maine, Minnesota. At the age of three, his family moved to California and two years later to Yakima, Washington, the town where he would grow up. Douglas, just five years old when his father died after stomach surgery, grew up in modest circumstances. His mother struggled to provide for him and his two younger siblings. From an early age, Douglas held many jobs, such as picking fruit and delivering newspapers. His outstanding performance in high school earned for him a scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. After graduating from college, he taught high school for a brief time before earning his law degree from Columbia University in New York.

After serving as a law professor at Columbia and Yale, Douglas entered government service when Franklin D. Roosevelt became president of the United States in 1933. Roosevelt appointed Douglas to serve as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the government agency that regulated and investigated corporations’ sale of stock. Douglas chaired the agency until March, 1939, when Roosevelt selected the forty-year-old Douglas for the U.S. Supreme Court. Because the U.S. Constitution does not limit the term of service for Supreme Court justices, many justices serve for life. As the youngest appointee in the twentieth century, Douglas was on the Court for thirty-six years and helped decide several thousand cases.

Life’s Work

Associate Justice Douglas helped to initiate a significant shift in the Court’s focus during Roosevelt’s presidency. Roosevelt’s long tenure as president (1933-1945) allowed him to appoint many replacements for justices who retired or died. At the time of Roosevelt’s death in 1945, eight of the nine justices on the Court, including Douglas, were his appointees. Douglas joined the other Roosevelt appointees in shifting the Court’s focus from cases analyzing the legality of social programs and economic regulation to devoting much of its attention to defining individual rights and liberties. It was during Douglas’s tenure as a justice that the Court made many of its most important decisions concerning racial equality, freedom of speech, and the rights of criminal defendants.

Douglas voted consistently in interpreting the Constitution as a document protecting the rights of individuals and limiting the government’s authority to control people’s lives. Studies of Supreme Court decision making found that Douglas, more frequently than any other justice of the twentieth century, favored individuals in their disputes with the government over civil rights and liberties, especially those cases concerning the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and religion.

Douglas was a prolific author of judicial opinions. He often wrote the dissenting opinion in those cases in which he disagreed with the Court’s decision. He dissented in those cases in which a majority of justices supported government authority over claims of individuals’ rights. For example, in Miller v. California(1973) he dissented against the Court’s efforts to create definitions for permissible obscenity and pornography because he believed that the First Amendment broadly protected people’s right to express themselves with words and pictures, even if those expressions were offensive to others. Similarly, he dissented during the 1950’s, in cases such as Dennis v. United States (1951), when the majority of justices permitted the government to prosecute and imprison people for teaching and advocating a political philosophy of communism. In Terry v. Ohio (1968), when the Court permitted police officers to stop and frisk people on the streets after observing suspicious behavior, Douglas was the lone justice to argue that there must be concrete evidence of criminal misconduct and not mere suspicion before police can interfere with a person’s liberty simply to be on a street.

Justice Douglas also wrote important majority opinions. In Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942), for example, Douglas wrote the decision that prohibited states from imposing forced sterilization on persons convicted of crimes. His most famous and controversial majority opinion came in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the case that announced the existence of a constitutional right to privacy. Although the word “privacy” does not appear in the Constitution, Douglas wrote that the right to privacy is older than the Constitution itself and can be recognized by reading between the lines of other provisions concerning search and seizure, freedom of association, and other rights. The reasoning in Douglas’s opinion in Griswold was later used by the Court to establish rights concerning abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973), the private sexual conduct of gay and lesbian adults (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003), and other controversial matters. Many critics claim that Douglas went too far in Griswold by inventing a right to privacy that does not exist in constitutional law.

Douglas gained a reputation as a fiercely independent justice who was not afraid to express his political views and conclusions about legal matters. In one memorable episode, lawyers approached him during the Court’s summer recess to challenge the legality of President Richard M. Nixon’s decision to expand U.S. military action in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Douglas drafted a temporary order prohibiting Nixon from further bombing in Cambodia, but the other justices quickly communicated with each other and unanimously overruled Douglas, thus preventing a major confrontation between the Court and the president (Holtzman v. Schlesinger, 1973).

The books he wrote about freedom, democracy, and American society clearly show Douglas’s independence and legal philosophy. His writings were controversial because critics believed that he was encouraging antiwar protestors and civil rights activists to rebel against society during the 1960’s. Indeed, his nonjudicial writings were used by Congressmember Gerald R. Ford in 1970 in his unsuccessful bid to persuade federal lawmakers to impeach Douglas and remove him from the Court. The impeachment effort was also fueled by the Nixon administration’s desire to seek revenge against political liberals after the U.S. Senate refused to confirm two conservative southern judges whom Nixon had sought to appoint to the Court. Douglas’s independence continued even after he retired from the Court in 1975 because of a debilitating stroke. He unsuccessfully sought to initiate a new policy that would permit retired justices to continue to participate in the Court’s deliberations in selected cases.

Significance

Douglas contributed significantly to the expansion of constitutional rights for Americans in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As an associate justice from 1939 to 1975, he participated in many of the Court’s most famous, and infamous, decisions, including the prohibition on governmental racial discrimination in Brown v. Board of Education; the provision of free speech protection for inflammatory, antigovernment speeches in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969); and the requirement that police officers inform suspects of their rights prior to questioning (Miranda v. Arizona, 1966). Douglas’s own opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) established the constitutional right to privacy and laid the foundation for subsequent Court decisions protecting individuals’ personal choices against intrusion by government. Because he was both the Supreme Court’s longest-serving justice and its most outspoken advocate of individual liberty and free expression, Douglas’s influence reached thousands of decisions that shaped, and will shape, the evolving definition of constitutional rights.

Bibliography

Ball, Howard, and Phillip J. Cooper. Of Power and Right: Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and America’s Constitutional Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Analysis of Douglas’s contributions to constitutional law and his legacy as a Supreme Court justice. Focuses on specific issues, including racial discrimination, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion.

Douglas, William O. The Court Years, 1939-1975. Vol. 2 in The Autobiography of William O. Douglas. New York: Random House, 1981. Focuses on Douglas’s role in decision making on the Supreme Court.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Go East Young Man: The Early Years The Autobiography of William O. Douglas. New York: Random House, 1974. Contains a first-person account of Douglas’s childhood, education, and early career. Later authors have challenged the honesty and accuracy of certain aspects of Douglas’s retelling of the details of his early life.

Murphy, Bruce Allen. Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas. New York: Random House, 2003. A comprehensive biography of Douglas. Presents a critical view of Douglas’s unfulfilled aspirations for political office and his efforts to shape his public image.

O’Brien, David M. Storm Center: The Supreme Court in American Politics. 6th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. Analysis of the history and internal operations of the Supreme Court. Includes discussion of Douglas’s role on the Court and his participation in the Court’s decision making.

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1971-2000: April 19, 1972: Environmentalists Are Defeated in Sierra Club v. Morton; January 21, 1974: U.S. Supreme Court Mandates Bilingual Education; July 2, 1976: U.S. Supreme Court Reinstates the Death Penalty.