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Crazy Supreme Court Justices: William O. Douglas
I think President Trump has made a fine appointment to the Supreme Court, and I wish Mr. Kavanaugh the best of luck in confirmation and career. However, I started to think about how mercurial some of those black-robed people who sit on SCOTUS have proven to be once they have received their lifetime appointments, and the country is stuck with them.
For example, “Wild Bill” Douglas, who, as well as being a chairman of the SEC, was considered one of the top law professors at Yale. He was nominated by FDR to replace Louis Brandeis, and he is famous for believing in individual rights, though he supported these with shady reasoning that relied on the magical “penumbras” from which he could derive “privacy” as a Constitutional guarantee.
He is also remembered for submitting judicial opinions written in as little as twenty minutes, lying repeatedly about his personal history to the point of making up a bout with polio as a youngster, having a tumultuous love life that was rife with spousal abuse and led to his record for most divorces obtained by a sitting justice, and losing a wee bit of his mind in the end.
Personally, I think the fact that one horse threw him from its back, breaking fourteen of Douglas’s ribs in Yakima, Washington, in 1949 and then another horse kicked him so hard he had to go to the hospital again in 1950 might say something about him.
Perhaps these episodes show he could be personally reckless, or maybe they illustrate even animals didn’t like him.
To be fair, the trees were probably pleased by the man, as he wrote a dissent saying inanimate objects like them should have legal standing to sue in American courts, but none of them can speak, so I cannot get their opinions.
There were two attempts to remove Douglas from SCOTUS, which went nowhere despite his flagrant politicking, slipshod judicial reasoning, and a moral compass so broken his children did not even bother to tell him when their mother died.
He is, actually, the longest serving justice in US history. He was on the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1975.
May we not have another of his caliber, though you can visit the judge where he rests beside greater men with lesser rank in Arlington National Cemetery anytime you’d like.
Published in General
Spot on. That’s exactly what Douglas said (conceded?) in Griswold. It follows directly on his famous “emanations” and “penumbras” sentence.
Oh yeah, good ole Douglas… from my stomping grounds… so glad he’s not around anymore.
He is beloved of CWU… that’s about it.
He wrote Roe right? How did he get anyone to sign on to that?
He was a better fisherman than SC justice… so glad we aren’t going to see another one of these… shameful really. But he comes from a great place.
I am not a lawyer at all. I only teach history, so this is all very interesting. I make a giant, big, fat deal out of John Marshall Harlan whenever I can, so I will look closer at Justice Curtis.
It’s a strange thing… Taney. Dred Scott is infamous and evil, but I find it fascinating that the Chief Justice had freed his own slaves, yes? This always spoke to me about how complicated people can be.
It is also important to note, I think, that Taney served a very, very long time on the court. Appointed by Andrew Jackson to replace John Marshall, he was like Douglas in that he (ironically) cared quite a lot about individual liberty. His hand is in much of the shaping of the court outside of Scott, and we would not, I suspect, disagree with all of that shaping.
Taney was married to the sister of Francis Scott Key.
Weird, huh?
Hey, Sash.
I think he filed a concurring opinion on Roe. He laid the groundwork for it with Griswold.
I’m sure he comes from a great place. The West is stunning, even if (sometimes) a bit crazy, too. :)
Although I don’t have the background to form coherent theories of history, it gnaws at me a bit when we judge historical figures by the standards of our time. There’s no question that the Dred Scott ruling is a collective blot on our history, but what about Taney? Was he truly evil or a man confined by the thought processes of his time? I know enough to see his opinion as an “activist” decision that was no doubt pleasing (unfortunately) to a significant number.
So this led me to dig up the Curtis quote that I mentioned earlier. This was in opposition to Taney (bolded is mine):
This is why textualism exists. Prescient much?
I agree with you, Hoyacon. I’d double-like this if I could. That’s a fabulous quote to have in one’s back pocket.
@LoisLane, I turned an argument I had with a friend about comment 30 on this thread into its own OP. It’s on the Ninth Amendment, and you might find it interesting.
Very interesting piece, Midge. Nicely written and thoughtful.
I am glad I finally got to this post. Excellent. Douglas was a man with some decent qualities but that does not out weigh the wrong he did nor some of the terrible decision he made. He typified what was wrong with the Court post World War II.
Now Justice Blackmun has to have an honorable mention as a terrible Justice. His Roe v. Wade opinion made no sense of any kind when he made it, he basically encouraged abortions by strangers, which he thought he was banning, and he did not not even understand the procedure or the issues at hand when making his decision. He further compounded his errors by defending the stupid decision for the rest of his life pretending that it made sense.
Twas a dark day that he was appointed to the court.
Why do you think his ideology seemed to flip so radically whilst on the bench?
Sometimes I think justices should have limited terms. Lifetime appointments just seem… too much.
I dislike questioning motives, but I have a thought about why justices who start off on the right sometimes move to the left, while the contrary almost never happens (Whizzer White, Kennedy’s appointee, may be an example of that happening, but I am too young to know anything about White. LOL)
My theory has to do with them being in Washington, where they come into contact with people on the Left. For whatever reason (wanting to be liked, attending more dinner parties, etc.), I think people who have no hard-core philosophy of judging, and little experience defending whatever system of judging they do possess, will have little trouble acclimating themself to the hard-core beliefs of others, the more they are with them.
I can’t remember if it was Nixon, or maybe Reagan who started asking prospective nominees whether their wives liked to go to parties.
Well Blackmun seems to have become Clarke D Forsythe wrote a book Abuse of Discretion: The Inside Story of Roe v. Wade. In that book Forsythe argues that Blackmun showed little interests in the legal history of abortion or how the laws of controlling abortion worked. What he saw instead was a social problem that he could fix. By making abortion legal he would make sure that women and their family doctors had the maximum flexibility to terminate or not a woman’s pregnancy and he thought that the decisions Wade and Bolton achieved that. Doctors everywhere would perform abortions freely and without fear and women would get them or not as they wished. A thorny social problem neatly taken care of by the court for all time before it got out of control.
The abortion debate was very immature back then and it seems that few if any of the justices on the court were familiar with the arguments at all and they latched on to faulty stats and history to cover their decision as Blackmun was clearly arguing back from his conclusion to find his premise.
His decision was so ill informed and so terrible that being a prideful man Blackmun double and tripled down on it because his decision was so indefensible. He could not accept how ill informed he was or how crazy his decision was. For him one of the most important reasons for his decision was to have women able to routinely have abortions with their family doctors instead of going to strangers. His decision instead guaranteed that nearly all abortions are preformed by strangers on women they have never met. Exactly what Blackmun wanted to stop.
Blackmun was a man that though he could fix things and solve problems with the awesome power of the modern court. The logic of his own self belief and the out sized power of the court combined to make him a terrible, terrible justice that was incapable of repentance. That is my take anyway. He also seemed to me to be deeply resentful that the American people simply didn’t agree with him. The Court approved abortion how could the nation not joyfully embrace it?! The gall of the people…
Sounds like Roger Taney then, though I’m not sure when the “modern court” begins. (I would say Dred Scott is an example of judges trying to solve a political problem by simply making stuff up.)
For me the modern court starts with the Court packing scheme of FDR. It seemed the court entered a new era then. There have been serious flaws with our Supreme Court since it began really. So I am with you there. Interesting I heard an interesting take on Taney that said that Taney knew what the Constitution said and what it really meant and so he was desperate to keep Black Americans from having standing. If he allowed them to get a foot in the door so to the speak the Constitution would undo nearly all restrictions on their rights. So Taney’s horrible decisions were at least being made in light of what the Constitution actually means, where I think in more recent times the Justices seem to believe the Constitution happens to say whatever they think it says at any given time.
I do not know enough about Taney and his court to know if that take is true but if it is then he kind of served tribute to virtue with his vice.