William O. Douglas: Dissent in Dennis v. United States

About the Author

William O. Douglas was one of the more idiosyncratic and naturally contrarian justices ever to serve on the Supreme Court. In his more than thirty-six years on the bench, Douglas authored 531 dissents, more than any other justice. His legal philosophy was strongly influenced by Underhill Moore, his professor at Columbia Law School and one of the most prominent of the legal realists, and by Louis D. Brandeis, the justice whose place Douglas took on the Supreme Court. From these two, he learned to draw upon sources as varied as poetry, sociology, agricultural reports, or his own intuition and to use these sources to justify his decisions, reflecting the realist belief that “real world” information needed to be considered in rendering legal decisions rather than relying exclusively on legal precedent. Douglas was known as a liberal throughout his tenure on the Court. In the 1930s he strongly supported President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal program, the legislative and governmental reorganization measures aimed at alleviating the Great Depression. He also was generally a consistent civil libertarian, though he grew into that role haltingly during World War II.

Douglas is often said to have been an ecologist before there was such a thing, and his love of nature and the unspoiled wilderness was evident in several notable opinions in major Supreme Court cases. Washington's William O. Douglas National Wilderness is named in his honor, in recognition of his efforts on behalf of the environment. Spending so much time in the outdoors sharpened Douglas's appreciation for unspoiled nature, which he maintained for the remainder of his life, intervening personally to save the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal from being turned into a highway and prompting some of Douglas's more controversial opinions on behalf of environmental concerns.

Douglas was born on October 16, 1898, in Maine, Minnesota, the son of Julia Fisk Douglas and the Reverend William Douglas. Following her husband's death in 1904, Julia moved the family to Yakima, Washington, where she purchased a small home before losing much of the family's money in a failed land investment. Growing up poor and working odd jobs from the age of seven on, Douglas developed an appreciation for hard work and a strong sense of class justice that later expressed itself in his belief that all citizens should be entitled to the rights and privileges afforded the wealthy. Douglas went to nearby Whitman College, where he graduated in 1920. After spending time teaching, he enrolled at Columbia Law School in 1922. Douglas took on several jobs at Columbia, including assisting with the compilation of case law books, a task for which he was unqualified. The intellectual vigor he employed in the task was indicative of the engagement with which an interested Douglas would approach problems on the bench.

After graduating from Columbia, Douglas floated through several positions over the next decade, including two stints at a Wall Street law firm and positions on both the Columbia and Yale faculties. There he developed more fully his appreciation for legal realism, which he had first encountered as a student at Columbia. This belief that the law as traditionally practiced was too distant from “real life” and needed to be supplemented with empirical studies from other disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, and economics, strongly influenced Douglas's legal thought process, which in turn influenced his decisions on the Supreme Court. He was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1939, after serving as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Douglas's approach and his willingness to sidestep judicial precedent in coming to his decisions made him a frequent—and sometimes justified—target of critics, who charged him with judicial activism. Douglas would set several records while on the bench, including the longest tenure. Throughout that time, he was the most consistently liberal justice, the steadiest civil libertarian, and the justice most willing to rule against corporate interests in favor of individuals or the environment. Nonetheless, he is widely viewed as having done liberal causes as much harm as good because he relied more on his own views in formulating his legal opinions than on case law precedents or an articulated legal philosophy. As a result, his impact was more limited than it otherwise could have been, and he left behind no theoretical legacy that succeeding justices could follow.