Difference between revisions of "William O. Douglas"

Revision as of 22:09, January 19, 2007

William Orville Douglas (1898-1980) was the longest serving Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in history, remaining on the bench for 36 years. Appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Douglas had been a law professor at Yale and Columbia University. Douglas is considered to have been one of the smartest Supreme Court Justices in history, but also an example of how a Justice can become increasingly liberal the longer he remains on the Supreme Court.

Justice Douglas wrote in the 1952 case of Zorach v. Clauson, "The First Amendment, however, does not say that in every and all respects there shall be a separation of Church and State... Otherwise the state and religion would be aliens to each other-hostile, suspicious, and even unfriendly. ... We are a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being ... When the state encourages religious instruction ... it follows the best of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe ... We find no constitutional requirement which makes it necessary for government to be hostile to religion. We cannot read into the Bill of Rights such a philosophy of hostility to religion."

But by the end of Justice Douglas' career in the 1970s, he had become hostile to everything religious and conservative. The future President Gerald Ford even felt compelled to attempt to impeach Douglas while Ford was a congressman. Douglas remained on the bench too long for even his liberal colleagues, and in Douglas' final year on the Supreme Court his colleagues refused to issue opinions in which Douglas was the deciding vote.