text:
Ferenc Mádl

Ferenc Mádl (29 January 1931 – 29 May 2011) was a Hungarian legal scholar, professor, and politician, who served as President of Hungary, between 4 August 2000 and 5 August 2005. Prior to that he had been minister without portfolio between 1990 and 1993 then Minister of Education between 1993 and 1994 in the conservative cabinets of József Antall and Péter Boross.

Mádl ran unsuccessfully for the position of President of Hungary in 1995, defeated by Árpád Göncz. Five years later he was elected head of state as the candidate of the governing conservative coalition.

Studies and scientific activities
Mádl was awarded a diploma from the Faculty of Law of the Eötvös Loránd University in 1955. Between 1961–1963 he studied at the faculty of international comparative law of the University of Strasbourg. He was awarded an academic degree as candidate of politics and law in 1964, and he received a doctorate in 1974 with his dissertation "The company and economic competition in the law of European economic integration". In 1987 he was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and then in 1993 he was made a full member of the Academy. In his scientific activities he has primarily dealt with matters of civil law, private international law and legal problems related to international economic relations, as well as European law.

He was secretary of the Scientific Qualifying Committee between 1984–1990, from 1985 he was a member of the Harvard Academy of International Commercial Law, from 1988 a member of the steering committee of the Rome international institute (UNIDROIT) for unifying private law, while from 1989 he was appointed as a central judge on the Washington-based international selected court for states and foreign investors. Besides the aforementioned positions he held he also assisted in the editing of several scientific journals and the work of scientific organizations, and was a member of several international academies. Mádl lectured at numerous foreign universities as guest professor, and was the author of several books and studies.

Professional career
From 1955 Mádl worked as a legal clerk and then as court secretary, then between 1956 and 1971 he worked as political and legal rapporteur at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Central Office, later being promoted to head of department. From 1971 he taught at the Budapest University of Sciences Department of Civil Law as a docent, before continuing this work as university tutor from 1973. In the meantime, between 1972 and 1980 he was on the staff of the Hungarian Academy's Institute of Politics and Law, and from 1978 until 1985 he held the post of director of the Institute of Civil Sciences. He was the director of the Faculty of Private International Law of the Budapest University of Sciences from 1985 until his death in May 2011.

He was not affiliated with any party. He undertook a role in political life after the change to democracy in 1989. From 23 May 1990 to 22 February 1993 as minister without portfolio in József Antall's government. He was charged with supervising the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; he assisted in defining government science policy goals as well as closely observing the harmonization of related state tasks and their implementation; on the basis of separate commissions he represented the government and the prime minister in international organizations; he cooperated with the ministers for justice, foreign affairs and international economic relations in the realization of certain tasks. From 1991 he also fulfilled duties as government commissioner in connection with the Bős-Nagymaros hydroelectric power plant project. At the instigation of the government, in late 1992 an inter-portfolio committee was formed under his chairmanship to research those works of art illegally taken to the former Soviet Union from Hungary during and after the Second World War, with the aim of winning their return.

He took the post of chairman of the board of directors of the State Property Agency on 1 August 1990, and from 1992 he exercised, on the authority of the government, supervisory powers over the State Bank Supervisory Authority, at the same time being appointed chairman of the Bank Supervisory Authority Committee, a role he filled until February 1993. He also exercised supervisory control over the Central Office of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the National Scientific Research Fund. He was appointed chairman of the government's Science Policy Committee in August 1990, and he headed the Human Resources Policy Cabinet between 1992–1993.

Between 22 February 1993 and 15 July 1994 he was minister for culture and education. Between February and July 1994 he filled the post of chairman of the Council for Higher Education and Science. Also in 1994, he was appointed chair of the National Cultural Fund. He stood as the opposition MDF-KDNP-Fidesz's nominee for President of the Republic in 1995. He had been chairman of the Hungarian Civil Cooperation Association since 1996. From 1999 he has been a member of the scientific advisory body for the Viktor Orbán government.

On 15 March 1999 he was awarded the Széchenyi Prize for his internationally recognized scientific achievements in the areas of European law, private international law and international commercial law, as well as for his higher educational and scientific organizational efforts. In September of the same year he was also honoured with the French order of the Légion d'honneur.

On 3 May 2000 he was nominated by Fidesz and the FKGP for the position of President of the Republic, which he accepted. The National Assembly of Hungary elected Ferenc Mádl President of the Republic on 6 June 2000. He was inaugurated as President of the Republic of Hungary on 4 August 2000. His duty, by Constitution, extended to 5 years. His term as President ended in 2005: he did not want to run again for the office. He was succeeded by László Sólyom, an independent candidate of the right-wing opposition, who defeated Katalin Szili in the indirect presidential election. After his presidency, Ferenc Mádl served as an Honorary Co-Chair for the World Justice Project. The World Justice Project works to lead a global, multidisciplinary effort to strengthen the Rule of Law for the development of communities of opportunity and equity.

Selected publications

 * A deliktuális felelősség a társadalom és a jog fejlődésének történetében (1964)
 * Az Európai Gazdasági Közösség joga (1974)
 * Összehasonlító nemzetközi magánjog (1978)
 * The Law of Transactions (1982)
 * A külgazdaság és a nemzetközi beruházások joga (1988)
 * State and Economy in Transformation (1997)
 * EU Integration Process – Enlargement and Institutional Reforms (1997)
 * Magyar nemzetközi magánjog és a nemzetközi gazdasági kapcsolatok joga (with Lajos Vékás, 1985–2004, 8 edition)
 * Az európai örökség útjain (1995).
 * Állam és gazdaság – Forradalom a jog útján a közép- és kelet-európai országokban (1997)
 * Quo vadis, Európa? (2004)
 * Állam és gazdaság – Forradalom a jog útján a közép- és kelet-európai országokban (1997)
 * Quo vadis, Európa? (2004)

Family
Mádl was married to Dalma Némethy; they had one son, András and three grandchildren. His second cousin was Antal Mádl, a literary historian and teacher.

Death
Ferenc Mádl died aged 80 on 29 May 2011. Hungarian President Pál Schmitt paid tribute to Mádl upon learning of his death. A statement released by his office said, "Pál Schmitt learnt with deep sorrow of the former head of state's death, and on this day personally expressed his condolences to [Mádl's] family." Prime Minister Viktor Orbán commented on posted on his Facebook page, "We are shocked to hear the news. May he rest in peace!"

On 6 June a memorial was held for the late President at the Parliament, where legislative Speaker László Kövér said that Ferenc Mádl was a Christian man, who brought with him his faith from the village where he was raised.

He was buried in a Catholic ritual with military honours at the Fiumei Street National Cemetery on 7 June in a funeral ceremony starting at 16.30 CEST.

Honors and awards
On 8 November 2002, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Jean Monnet Foundation for Europe for his commitment to peace, liberty, justice and solidarity in Europe.

 * 🇵🇱 Poland: Order of the White Eagle (26 June 2001)
 * 🇱🇻 Latvia: Commander Grand Cross with Chain of the Order of Three Stars (Oct. 2001)
 * 🇪🇪 Estonia: Collar of the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana
 * 🇭🇷 Croatia: Knight Grand Cross of the Grand Order of King Tomislav ("For outstanding contribution to the promotion of friendship and development co-operation between the Republic of Croatia and the Republic of Hungary.", 15 March 2002)
 * 🇳🇴 Norway: Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. Olav
 * 🇮🇹 Italy: Knight Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (17 June 2002)
 * 🇷🇴 Romania: Grand Cross with Chain of the Order of the Star of Romania (2002)
 * 🇫🇮 Finland: Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of the White Rose of Finland (2002)
 * 🇦🇱 Albania: On 30 January 2005 received a copy of the key of the city of Tirana on the occasion of his state visit to Albania.
 * 🇪🇸 Spain: Collar of the Order of Isabella the Catholic (14 January 2005). His wife is Grand Cross of the same order.
 * 🇨🇱 Chile: Collar of the Order of Merit (25 September 2002).

title: Ferenc Mádl


text:
Understudy

In theatre, an understudy, referred to in opera as cover or covering, is a performer who learns the lines and blocking or choreography of a regular actor, actress, or other performer in a play. Should the regular actor or actress be unable to appear on stage, the understudy takes over the part. Usually when the understudy takes over, the theater manager announces the cast change prior to the start of the performance. Coined in 1874, the term understudy has more recently generally been applied only to performers who can back up a role, but still regularly perform in another role.

Similar tasks
Performers who are only committed to covering a part and do not regularly appear in the show are often referred to as standbys and alternates. Standbys are normally required to sign in and remain at the theater the same as other cast members, although sometimes they may call in, until they are released by the production stage manager. If there is no doubt about the health of the actor being covered, or there are no hazardous stunts to perform, a standby may be released at the first intermission, if not before. At times, standbys are required to stay within a certain area around the theater (10 blocks in New York City is a common standard). Today, the standbys must also have a cell phone so that at any time they can be called to the theater.

Alternates, like standbys, do not have a regular role in the production, but they are scheduled to perform a physically and vocally challenging role for a certain number of performances each week. They commonly go on for matinee performances. Examples of this include the starring roles in Evita, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Dear Evan Hansen, Les Misérables, Jekyll & Hyde, and The Phantom of the Opera.

In musical theater, the term swing is often used for a member of the company who understudies several chorus and/or dancing roles. If an understudy fills in for a lead role, a swing acts the parts normally performed by the understudy. A super swing or universal swing is a swing who commutes around the country as needed to act in various productions of a widespread show.

In contrast, a prompt cues an actor while not personally being on the stage or in the spotlight.

Multiple understudies
In some instances, multiple understudies are assigned to cover the same role and ranked by priority. If the principal actor is unable to perform, the role devolves to the highest-priority understudy who is available.

Notable examples
Several actors made their names in show business as understudies who took over leading actors’ roles for several performances. Examples include Anthony Hopkins for Laurence Olivier, when Olivier became ill with cancer during the run of the National Theater's The Dance of Death, 1967; Ted Neeley and Carl Anderson for Jeff Fenholt and Ben Vereen respectively during the 1971 Broadway run of Jesus Christ Superstar when Neeley and Anderson were asked to star in the 1973 film version and subsequent tours; and Edward Bennett for David Tennant as Hamlet in the RSC's 2008 production. Kerry Ellis was called to perform as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady when Martine McCutcheon took ill. In the audience that day was Brian May, who was then writing his musical We Will Rock You, and he was so impressed with Ellis's performance he immediately wanted to cast her as Meat, a lead in the show.

In 1974, baritone Thomas Allen fell ill during a performance at The Proms of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. His understudy was unable to take over – he was a medical doctor, and was attending to Allen. Patrick McCarthy, then unknown, stepped out of the audience, went backstage, and offered his services as a professional singer who knew the part. He received a standing ovation.

In 1978, Madeline Kahn departed the Broadway musical On the Twentieth Century nine weeks into its run. The New York Times reported that "she said she was withdrawing because of damage to her vocal cords." She was replaced by understudy Judy Kaye, who had been playing a small role, and the critics were invited to return. According to The New York Times, "bang, boom, overnight [Kaye] is a star." They praised her performance, Kaye won a Theatre World Award, and her theatrical career took off. She later starred in the US tour opposite Rock Hudson.

In 2002 (and also in 2003, 2005 and 2006), Sam Moran had filled in for Greg Page in the children's entertainment singing group the Wiggles during their concerts more than 150 times before stepping up as part of the official lineup in November 2006.

When Carol Haney broke her ankle while playing the role of Gladys in The Pajama Game, Shirley MacLaine assumed the role.

Arthur Stanley Jefferson, also known as Stan Laurel, was an understudy of Charlie Chaplin working for Fred Karno, a music hall impresario, before Laurel and Chaplin entered American film.

Roberto Alagna opened the 2006–07 season at La Scala on 7 December 2006 in the new production of Aida by Franco Zeffirelli. During the second performance on 10 December, Alagna, whose opening performance was considered ill-at-ease, was booed and whistled from the loggione (the least expensive seats at the very top of La Scala), and he walked off the stage. The role of Radames was taken over successfully for the rest of the performance by his understudy Antonello Palombi, who entered on stage wearing jeans and a black shirt.

During the 25th-anniversary performance of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical The Phantom of the Opera, the titular character and Christine are played by understudies Simon Shorten and Katie Hall when they walk on a lowering walkway during the title song. In the film release of the performance, footage of the principal actors (in full costume) singing the song on the walkway was filmed in one rehearsal and added in the final cut.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Understudy


text:
User:Litsehimmel~enwiki

Located in Fryslân (OKA as Friesland) in The Netherlands, where a large percentage of my family roots lay buried. Former freelance journalist/correspondent with over 30 years of freelance translator experience. Pursuing genealogy on a semi-professional level. Predominantly active as 'family manager'.

title: User:Litsehimmel~enwiki


text:
Talk:Air navigation

The United States has GPS approaches. I believe GPS is perfectly legal for use as a primary means of navigation and one can file a flight plan with the route as 'GPS direct'. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what the author meant at the end of the page.

 * I wrote it. It sounds like the situation has changed since 2000 in that case, or maybe the US allowed GPS prior to that time. It's still not approved in the UK for primary navigation AFAIK. Someone with the definitive facts should amend the article, unfortunately it seems my own knowledge is out of date. GRAHAMUK 08:11, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)

 * I don't know the status of the UK, but I know GPS is legal as primary navigation (for most things) in the US and has been for about five years. I'm told that 'most' countries have followed suit. Selective Availability is now a thing of the past and RAIM makes GPS much more reliable. WAAS will make it even more so. You cannot, for example, substitute the GPS location for a VOR for that VOR in an approach (if that was allowed, the FAA would publish a GPS approach), but you can substitute an en route intersection so long as you retrieved the intersection from the GPS's database and that database is current. (You can't enter the fix yourself. The FAA considers the chance that you'd make a mistake to be too great.)

GA??
GA = General Aviation?? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 6.3.55.1 (talk) 23:20, 7 December 2006 (UTC).

 * Absolutely! - Mugs 18:55, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

 * Actually, civil aviation is better. GA (which includes corporate jets) is only one part of civil aviation - the other is scheduled air carrier/airline service.  In the great majority of cases, GA and air carriers use identical navigational equipment and procedures for IFR flight. Captjosh (talk) 16:23, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Expert needed
This article needs an expert - it is missing important content (e.g. intertial navigation, radar navigation), and its unreferenced content looks dodgy. Socrates2008 ( Talk  )   12:12, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

 * I'll clean-up the article with factual (and cited) information, as well as incorporating the suggestions in this discussion page. A little backloged at the moment, but will jump on this soon. Captjosh (talk) 15:00, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Second Paragraph
The second paragraph has problems for example:

Aircraft travel at relatively high speeds, leaving less time to calculate their position en route.

- Time to calculate position is related to speed and distance to navigation hazards not speed alone. An aircraft crossing the ocean has plenty of time to calculate position.

 * The author's comparison of speed and distance between surface vehicles and high speed aircraft is a matter of "apples and oranges." They cannot be compared due to lack of perspective.
 * Yes, speed + distance = time to destination. Who has less time to calculate position and route?  A motorist taking a detour to avoid a traffic nightmare while driving to an airport because they are late, or an aircraft traveling hundreds of MPH faster to a waypoint 240 miles away?
 * With obvious exceptions, the larger the aircraft, the faster it travels, and the more sophisticated navigation instrumentation. Various modern navigational equipment and computer integration (FMS, etc.) allow entire routes, or portions of them, to be recalculated in a matter of moments. Can Aunt Judy's car do this, or does she need to pull out maps, ask for help, etc? Captjosh (talk) 16:23, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Aircraft normally cannot stop in mid-air to ascertain their position at leisure.

- The Exxon Valdez and the Cosco Busan did not have "leisure" to ascertain their position

 * "Normally??" If a plane stops in mid-air, and it's not an aerobatic plane at an airshow, the last thing you'll be worried about is your location. Captjosh (talk) 16:23, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

constant awareness of position is critical for aircraft pilots.

- Again not true, for instance for crew of an aircraft flying from New York to Singapore

 * I agree, "constant awareness of position" with 100% vigilance for such a route. Occasional position reference to ensure proper course (for fuel planning purposes and ETOPS compliance, which should be a problem if flying a published IFR oceanic route) is enough, in my opinion.

 * Constant "situational awareness," not position awareness, is critical for pilots at all times. Constant position awareness on an IFR flight if the route is being flown as filed (according to procedures, charts, ATC, etc.).  A pilot should be "more aware" of position when flying near obstructions on the departure and arrival portions of the IFR flight.  Greater position awareness is required for VFR flight because pilots are not following published (approved) airways or procedures, is usually not in contact with ATC, and may get lost easier; heck, they navigate primarily with a map, visual references, dead reckoning, pilotage, and a stopwatch.  This position awareness should be greatest near obstructions ("see and avoid") and near airspace requiring either a clearance to enter, or at least 2-way communications with ATC. Captjosh (talk) 16:23, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

I suggest the entire paragraph be deleted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by CaptCarlsen (talk • contribs) 20:24, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

 * I don't think this section should be deleted necessarily, but should be edited greatly. A short statement describing a large difference between ground and air navigation may help users understand that it's not just requesting directions from mapquest. However, I agree that most most of the statements above and am adding specific contents there. Captjosh (talk) 16:23, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Flight Planning
Richard McDonald Woods 18:22, 18 December 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mcdonar (talk • contribs)
 * ETP is inaccurately claimed to be the point at which the time to fly from current position to departure and destination airports is the same. Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) 121 states that ETP is the point at which the time to fly from current position to last 'suitable airport' and next 'suitable airport' is the same.
 * fuel weight remaining can be greater than maximum fuel weight allowed with one/two engines out at ETP, requiring a descent to a maintainable altitude and a fuel dump in order to be able to fly to either 'suitable airport'. 'Suitable airport' is defined in FAR.
 * I suggest that the article is revised to make it less a discussion, and more notable.

Focus on USA
Bad tho say that this article is completely focussed on USA. The described technologies have never been introduced in the whole world, but are limited to US and probably canadian territory.

Can anyone enlarge the base of this article, or is it reserved to US-english oriented readers?

--92.106.99.83 (talk) 16:17, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

External links modified (January 2018)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Air navigation. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110520040826/http://www.irbs.com/bowditch/pdf/glossary/gloss-n.pdf to http://www.irbs.com/bowditch/pdf/glossary/gloss-n.pdf

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 06:40, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion: Participate in the deletion discussion at the. —Community Tech bot (talk) 18:36, 19 November 2022 (UTC)
 * B737-300 FMC.jpg

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion
The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion: You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 15:07, 10 February 2023 (UTC)
 * B737-300 FMC.jpg

title: Talk:Air navigation


text:
William J. Brennan Jr.

William Joseph Brennan Jr. (April 25, 1906 – July 24, 1997) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1956 to 1990. He was the seventh-longest serving justice in Supreme Court history, and was known for being a leader of the Court's liberal wing.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Brennan studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania and then attended Harvard Law School. He entered private legal practice in New Jersey and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He was appointed in 1951 to the Supreme Court of New Jersey. Shortly before the 1956 presidential election, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used a recess appointment to place Brennan on the Supreme Court. Brennan won Senate confirmation the following year. He remained on the Court until his retirement in 1990, and was succeeded by David Souter.

On the Supreme Court, Brennan was known for his outspoken progressive views, including opposition to the death penalty as he dissented in more than 1,400 cases in which the Supreme Court refused to review a death sentence, and support for abortion rights and gay rights. He authored numerous landmark case opinions, including: Baker v. Carr (1962), establishing that the apportionment of legislative districts is a justiciable issue; New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), which required "actual malice" in libel suits brought by public officials; Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), which established a legal right to contraception for unmarried people and helped solidify the sexual revolution; and Craig v. Boren (1976) which established that laws which discriminate on the basis of sex are subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause.

Due to his ability to shape a wide variety of opinions and bargain for votes in many cases, he was considered to be among the Court's most influential members. Justice Antonin Scalia called Brennan "probably the most influential Justice of the [20th] century."

Early life and education
William J. Brennan Jr. was born on April 25, 1906, in Newark, New Jersey, the second of eight children. Both his parents, William and Agnes (McDermott) Brennan, were Irish immigrants. They met in the United States, although both were originally from County Roscommon in Ireland. William Brennan Sr. had little education and worked as a metal polisher, but rose to a position of leadership, serving as the Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Newark from 1927 to 1930.

Brennan attended public schools in Newark, and graduated from Barringer High School in 1924. He then attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated cum laude with a degree in economics in 1928. While there, he joined Delta Tau Delta fraternity. Brennan graduated from Harvard Law School near the top of his class in 1931 and was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.

When he was 21, Brennan married Marjorie Leonard, whom he had met in high school. They eventually had three children: William III, Nancy, and Hugh.

Early legal career
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Brennan entered private practice in his home state of New Jersey, where he practiced labor law at the firm of Pitney Hardin (which would later become Day Pitney). During World War II, Brennan was commissioned in the Army as a major in March 1942, and left as a colonel in 1945. He did legal work for the ordnance division. In 1949, Brennan was appointed to the Superior Court (a trial court) by Governor of New Jersey Alfred E. Driscoll. In 1951, Driscoll appointed him to the Supreme Court of New Jersey.

Supreme Court appointment
Brennan was given a recess appointment as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on October 15, 1956, shortly before the 1956 presidential election, and was sworn into office the following day. The president's advisers thought the appointment of a Roman Catholic Democrat from the Northeast would woo critical voters in the upcoming re-election campaign for Eisenhower, a Republican. Cardinal Francis Spellman had asked Eisenhower to appoint a Catholic to the court. Brennan was one of two candidates who met Eisenhower's three criteria: experience on lower courts; relative youth and good health; and a Catholic.

Brennan gained the attention of Herbert Brownell, United States Attorney General and Eisenhower's chief legal affairs adviser, when Brennan had to give a speech at a conference (as a substitute for New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Arthur Vanderbilt). To Brownell, Brennan's speech seemed to suggest a marked conservatism, especially on criminal matters.

His nomination, formally submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 14, 1957, faced a small amount of controversy from two angles. The National Liberal League opposed the nomination of a Catholic, thinking he would rely on his religious beliefs rather than the Constitution when ruling, and Senator Joseph McCarthy had read transcripts of Brennan's speech where he decried overzealous anti-Communist investigations as "witch-hunts." After a confirmation hearing in which Brennan defended himself against McCarthy's attacks and proclaimed that he would rule solely on the basis of the Constitution and not on Church law, he was confirmed by a near-unanimous vote, with only Senator McCarthy voting against him.

Other factors playing into Brennan's appointment were his status as a state court judge – no state judge had been appointed to the High Court since Benjamin N. Cardozo in 1932 – and Eisenhower's desire to appear bipartisan after his appointments of two Republicans: Earl Warren (former Governor of California) and John Marshall Harlan II.

Brennan filled the seat vacated by Justice Sherman Minton. He held the post until his retirement on July 20, 1990, for health reasons; he was succeeded on the Court by Justice David Souter. He was the last federal judge in active service to have been appointed to his position by President Eisenhower. Brennan then taught at Georgetown University Law Center until 1994. With 1,360 opinions, he is second only to William O. Douglas in number of opinions written while a Supreme Court justice.

Warren Court
An outspoken liberal throughout his career, he played a leading role in the Warren Court's expansion of individual rights. Brennan played a behind-the-scenes role during the Warren Court, coaxing more conservative colleagues to join the Court's decisions. Brennan's opinions with respect to voting (Baker v. Carr), criminal proceedings (Malloy v. Hogan), the free speech and establishment clauses of the First Amendment (Roth v. United States), and civil rights (Green v. County School Board of New Kent County) were some of the most important opinions of the Warren Era. Brennan's role in expanding free speech rights under the First Amendment is particularly notable, as he wrote the Court's opinion in 1964's New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, which created constitutional restrictions on the law of libel. It was Brennan who coined the phrase "chilling effect", in 1965's Dombrowski v. Pfister. His close friendship with Chief Justice Warren, who frequently assigned Brennan the task of writing the majority opinion, led to the other justices nicknaming him the "deputy Chief".

In the 1962–1963 term, one of Brennan's law clerks was Richard A. Posner, who later became a founder of the field of Law and Economics and one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States.

Burger and Rehnquist Courts
On the less liberal Burger Court, Brennan was a staunch opponent of the death penalty and a supporter of abortion rights and joined the majority in landmark rulings on both issues (Furman v. Georgia (1972) on the death penalty and Roe v. Wade (1973) on abortion). With the departure of moderate Potter Stewart in 1981, the ascension of the most conservative member of the court, William Rehnquist, to the position of Chief Justice, following the retirement of Warren Burger, Brennan found himself more frequently isolated. At times, his opinions would be joined only by Thurgood Marshall since, by 1975, they were the last remaining liberals of the Warren Court. That like-mindedness led to both Brennan and Marshall's clerks referring to them as "Justice Brennan-Marshall" in the face of the court's heavy conservative opposition to the two. Brennan declared in Furman that he believed the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on "cruel and unusual" punishment, and for his remaining years on the bench, he and Marshall dissented from every case upholding the imposition of the death penalty. He was able to convince no other justice of this view, but Justice Harry Blackmun would eventually agree in 1994, after Brennan's retirement.

Brennan authored three Supreme Court opinions holding that a plaintiff has a cause of action for money damages (compensatory and punitive) arising solely out of an alleged violation of the Bill of Rights. In Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, Brennan so held with respect to the Unreasonable Search and Seizure clause of the Fourth Amendment. In Davis v. Passman, Brennan extended this rationale to the equal protection component of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, in a suit for gender discrimination in employment against a former Congressman (Congressional staffers were explicitly excluded from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act). In Carlson v. Green, Brennan extended this rationale again to the Cruel and Unusual Punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment, in a suit by the estate of a deceased federal prisoner (even though the plaintiff also had a cause of action under the Federal Tort Claims Act).

During the same period, Brennan began to adopt and promote a coherent and expansive vision of personal jurisdiction. He authored the sole dissent in Helicopteros Nacionales de Colombia, S. A. v. Hall, defining minimum contacts very broadly for the purposes of general jurisdiction, and influential dissents and partial concurrences in World-Wide Volkswagen Corp. v. Woodson and Asahi Metal Industry Co. v. Superior Court on the subject of specific jurisdiction, holding to a simple "stream-of-commerce" analysis for product liability cases and emphasizing the role of fairness in the Court's analysis of the holding in International Shoe Co. v. Washington. In Burger King v. Rudzewicz, Brennan authored the majority opinion and extended his broad view of personal jurisdiction to areas of business contracts and franchising. The upshot of Brennan's analysis is an expansion of the jurisdiction of state courts, particularly over corporations; state courts are typically more sympathetic to small, weak plaintiffs than to large, powerful corporate defendants. In this process, he frequently clashed with Justice Scalia over this issue, and uncharacteristically dissented from Justice Marshall's majority opinion on the subject in Shaffer v. Heitner.

In his penultimate and final terms on the Court, he wrote the controversial rulings for Texas v. Johnson and United States v. Eichman, respectively. In both cases, the Court held that the First Amendment protects desecration of the United States flag.

Brennan's wife Marjorie died in December 1982. Slightly more than three months later, in March 1983 at age 76, he married Mary Fowler, who had served as his secretary for 26 years. Brennan's colleagues learned of his second marriage via a short office memo stating, "Mary Fowler and I were married yesterday and we have gone to Bermuda."

Judicial philosophy
Brennan strongly believed in the Bill of Rights, arguing early on in his career that it should be applied to the states in addition to the federal government. He often took positions in favor of individual rights against the state, favoring criminal defendants, minorities, the poor, and other underrepresented groups. Furthermore, he generally shied away from the absolutist liberal positions of Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, being very amenable to compromise in order to win a majority of Justices. Brennan's conservative detractors charged that he was a purveyor of judicial activism, accusing him of deciding outcomes before coming up with a legal rationale for them. At his retirement, Brennan said the case he thought was most important was Goldberg v. Kelly, which ruled that a local, state or federal government could not terminate welfare payments to a person without a prior individual evidentiary hearing.

In the 1980s, as the Reagan administration and the Rehnquist Court threatened to "roll back" the decisions of the Warren Court, Brennan became more vocal about his jurisprudential views. In a 1985 speech at Georgetown University, Brennan criticized Attorney General Edwin Meese's call for a "jurisprudence of original intention" as "arrogance cloaked as humility" and advocated reading the U.S. Constitution to protect rights of "human dignity".

Brennan was also less interested in stare decisis or the avoidance of "absolutist" positions where the death penalty was concerned, as he believed that the deliberate taking of human life by the state, as a punishment, was inherently cruel and unusual. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, Brennan's closest ally in the Court, concluded in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty was, in all circumstances, unconstitutional, and never accepted the legitimacy of Gregg v. Georgia, which ruled that the death penalty was constitutional four years later. Thereafter, Brennan or Marshall took turns, joined by the other, in issuing a dissent in every denial of certiorari in a capital case, and from every decision in a case which the Court did take which failed to vacate a sentence of death.

Brennan also authored a dissent from the denial of certiorari in Glass v. Louisiana. In Glass, the Court chose not to hear a case that challenged the constitutionality of the use of the electric chair as a form of execution. Brennan wrote:

"Th[e] evidence suggests that death by electrical current is extremely violent and inflicts pain and indignities far beyond the 'mere extinguishment of life'. Witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner 'cringes,' 'leaps,' and 'fights the straps with amazing strength.' 'The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands.' The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and 'rest on [his] cheeks.' The prisoner often defecates, urinates, and vomits blood and drool."

Brennan concluded by stating that electrocution is "nothing less than the contemporary technological equivalent of burning people at the stake." Brennan voted with the majority in Roe v. Wade which legalized abortion nationally and helped craft the decision. Brennan wrote the majority opinion in Roth v. United States which set new standards for obscenity laws, allowing some prosecutions, but drastically loosening the laws overall. He later reversed his position in dissent in Miller v. California arguing that obscenity laws were unconstitutional. Although Brennan joined the majority in United States v. O'Brien which upheld the constitutionality of laws banning draft card burning, he later opposed the Vietnam War and dissented several times when the Supreme Court refused to hear challenges to its legality. In a dissent in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez Brennan argued that unequal funding of poor and wealthy school districts violated the Equal Protection Clause.

Brennan supported gay rights. In a dissent from a denial of certiorari in 1985 involving a lesbian teacher fired for her sexual orientation, Brennan publicly criticized homophobia, writing "Homosexuals have historically been the object of deep and sustained pernicious hostility, and it is fair to say that discrimination against homosexuals is likely to reflect deep-seated prejudice rather than rationality." He joined the dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick, which allowed states to prosecute consensual homosexual sodomy, a decision which the Court announced in June 1986.

He is regarded as one of the most liberal justices in the history of the court.

Later life and death
Brennan's retirement in 1990 was precipitated by a mild stroke. While he initially intended to continue serving, his doctors told him that he would be at risk of a more debilitating stroke if he kept working.

Throughout retirement, Brennan maintained a friendly relationship with his successor, David Souter. In 1995, the Brennan Center for Justice opened at New York University, a research institute created at the initiative of several of Brennan's former clerks, and named in his honor.

In November 1996, Brennan fell and broke his hip, and underwent rehabilitation for the injury at a nursing home in Arlington, Virginia, where he died on July 24, 1997, at the age of 91. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, beside his first wife and near the gravesites of other Supreme Court justices.

Honors and awards
As a result of his long and distinguished career on the United States Supreme Court, Brennan was honored with many different awards. In 1969, he was awarded the Laetare Medal by the University of Notre Dame, considered the most prestigious award for American Catholics. In 1987, Brennan received the U.S. Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards. In 1989, the historic Hudson County Courthouse in Jersey City, New Jersey, which had opened in 1910, was renamed the William J. Brennan Court House in his honor and, in that same year, he received the Freedom Medal. On November 30, 1993, President Bill Clinton presented Brennan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Upon his death, Brennan lay in repose in the Great Hall of the United States Supreme Court Building.

Years after his death, in 2010, Brennan was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame and William J. Brennan High School was founded in San Antonio, Texas, honoring him. Brennan Park across from the historic Essex County Veterans Courthouse in Newark, New Jersey, was named in Brennan's honor and a statue of him was erected in front of the Essex County Hall of Records by historian Guy Sterling.

title: William J. Brennan Jr.


text:
William O. Douglas

William Orville Douglas (October 16, 1898 – January 19, 1980) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1939 to 1975. Douglas was known for his strong progressive and civil libertarian views and is often cited as the U.S. Supreme Court's most liberal justice ever. Nominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, Douglas was confirmed at the age of 40, becoming one of the youngest justices appointed to the court. In 1975, Time called Douglas "the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court." He is the longest-serving justice in history, having served for 36 years and 211 days.

After an itinerant childhood, Douglas attended Whitman College on a scholarship. He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1925 and joined the Yale Law School faculty. After serving as the third chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Douglas was successfully nominated to the Supreme Court in 1939, succeeding Justice Louis Brandeis. He was among those seriously considered for the 1944 Democratic vice presidential nomination and was subject to an unsuccessful draft movement prior to the 1948 U.S. presidential election. Douglas served on the Court until his retirement in 1975 and was succeeded by John Paul Stevens. Douglas holds a number of records as a Supreme Court justice, including the most opinions.

Douglas's notable opinions included Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)—which established the constitutional right to privacy, and was foundational to later cases such as Eisenstadt v. Baird, Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges—Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942), United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948), Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949), Brady v. Maryland (1963), and Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966). Douglas also served as an associate justice in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a Supreme Court case that outlawed segregation in American public schools. He wrote notable concurring or dissenting opinions in cases such as Dennis v. United States (1951), United States v. O’Brien (1968), Terry v. Ohio (1968), and Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). He was also known as a strong opponent of the Vietnam War and an ardent advocate of environmentalism.

Early life and education
Douglas was born in 1898 in Maine Township, Otter Tail County, Minnesota, to William Douglas and Julia Bickford Fisk. Douglas's father was a Scottish itinerant Presbyterian minister from Pictou County, Nova Scotia. The family first moved to California and then to Cleveland, Washington. Douglas said he suffered from an illness at age two that he described as polio, although a biographer reveals that it was intestinal colic. His mother attributed his recovery to a miracle, telling Douglas that one day he would be President of the United States.

His father died in Portland, Oregon in 1904, when Douglas was six years old. Douglas later claimed his mother had been left destitute. After moving the family from town to town in the West, his mother, with three young children, settled in Yakima, Washington. William, like the rest of the Douglas family, did odd jobs to earn extra money, and a college education appeared to be unaffordable. He was the valedictorian at Yakima High School and did well enough in school to earn a full academic scholarship to attend Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

At Whitman, Douglas became a member of Beta Theta Pi fraternity. He worked at various jobs while attending school, including as a waiter and janitor during the school year, and at a cherry orchard in the summer. Picking cherries, Douglas would say later, inspired him to pursue a legal career. He once said of his early interest in the law: "I worked among the very, very poor, the migrant laborers, the Chicanos and the I.W.W's who I saw being shot at by the police. I saw cruelty and hardness, and my impulse was to be a force in other developments in the law."

Douglas was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, participated on the debate team, and was elected as student body president in his final year. After graduating in 1920 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and economics, he taught English and Latin at his old high school for the next two years, hoping to earn enough to attend law school. "Finally," he said, "I decided it was impossible to save enough money by teaching and I said to hell with it."

Military service
In the summer of 1918, Douglas took part in a U.S. Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps training encampment at the Presidio of San Francisco. That fall, he joined the Student Army Training Corps at Whitman as a private. He served from October to December, and was honorably discharged because the Armistice of November 11, 1918 ended the war and the army's requirements for more soldiers and officers.

Law school
He traveled to New York taking a job tending sheep on a Chicago-bound train, in return for free passage, with hopes to attend the Columbia Law School. Douglas drew on his Beta Theta Pi membership to help him survive in New York, as he stayed at one of its houses and was able to borrow $75 from a fraternity brother from Washington, enough to enroll at Columbia. Six months later, Douglas's funds were running out. The appointments office at the law school told him that a New York firm wanted a student to help prepare a correspondence course for law. Douglas earned $600 for his work, enabling him to stay in school. Hired for similar projects, he saved $1,000 by semester's end.

In August 1923, Douglas traveled to La Grande, Oregon, to marry Mildred Riddle, whom he had known in Yakima. Douglas graduated second in his class at Columbia in 1925.

During the summer of 1925, Douglas started work at the firm of Cravath, DeGersdorff, Swaine and Wood (later Cravath, Swaine & Moore) after failing to obtain a Supreme Court clerkship with Harlan F. Stone. Douglas was hired at Cravath by attorney John J. McCloy, who would later become the chairman of the Board of Chase Manhattan Bank.

Yale Law School
Douglas quit the Cravath firm after four months. After one year, he moved back to Yakima, but soon regretted the move and never practiced law in Washington. After a time of unemployment and another months-long stint at Cravath, he started teaching at Columbia Law School. In 1928, he joined the faculty of Yale Law School, where he became an expert on commercial litigation and bankruptcy law. He was identified with the legal realist movement, which pushed for an understanding of law based less on formalistic legal doctrines and more on the real-world effects of the law. Teaching at Yale, he and the fellow professor Thurman Arnold were riding the New Haven Railroad and were inspired to set the sign Passengers will please refrain... to Antonín Dvořák's Humoresque #7. Robert Maynard Hutchins described Douglas as "the most outstanding law professor in the nation." When Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago, Douglas accepted an offer to move there, but he changed his mind once he had been made a Sterling Professor at Yale.

Securities and Exchange Commission
In 1934, Douglas left Yale after President Franklin Roosevelt nominated him to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). By 1937, he had become an adviser and friend to the President and the chairman. He also became friends with a group of young New Dealers, including Tommy "The Cork" Corcoran and Abe Fortas. He was also close, both socially and in thinking to the Progressives of the era, such as Philip and Robert La Follette Jr. That social/political group befriended Lyndon Johnson, a freshman representative from the 10th District of Texas. In his 1982 book The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, Robert Caro wrote that in 1937, Douglas had helped to persuade Roosevelt to authorize the Marshall Ford Dam, a controversial project whose approval enabled Johnson to consolidate his power as a representative.

Supreme Court
In 1939, Justice Louis D. Brandeis retired from the Court, and Roosevelt nominated Douglas as his replacement on March 20. Douglas was Brandeis's personal choice as a successor. Douglas later revealed that his appointment had been a great surprise to him (Roosevelt had summoned him to an "important meeting"), and Douglas feared that he would be named as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on April 4 by a vote of 62 to 4. The four negative votes were all cast by Republicans: Lynn J. Frazier, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Gerald P. Nye, and Clyde M. Reed. Douglas was sworn into office on April 17, 1939. At the age of forty, Douglas was the fifth-youngest justice to be confirmed to the Supreme Court.

Relationships with others at Supreme Court
Douglas was often at odds with fellow justice Felix Frankfurter, who believed in judicial restraint and thought the court should stay out of politics. Douglas did not highly value judicial consistency or stare decisis when deciding cases. "But the origin of Douglas and Frankfurter's deep-seated animosity went beyond important jurisprudential differences. Temperamentally, they were opposites. From the beginning of their close associations as justices, the two men simply grated on each other's nerves. . . . Although in 1974 Douglas claimed that there had been no 'war' between him and Frankfurter, the evidence to the contrary was overwhelming. Frankfurter and Douglas, two important American jurists whose decades-long bitter debates (indeed, whose 'wars') contributed a great deal to our understanding of constitutionalism in a modern society, could not tolerate each other. Intentionally and unintentionally, they went out of their way to harass each other for over two decades."

Judge Richard A. Posner, who was a law clerk for justice William J. Brennan Jr. during the latter part of Douglas's tenure, characterized Douglas as "a bored, distracted, uncollegial, irresponsible" Supreme Court justice, as well as "rude, ice-cold, hot-tempered, ungrateful, foul-mouthed, self-absorbed" and so abusive in "treatment of his staff to the point where his law clerks—whom he described as 'the lowest form of human life'—took to calling him "shithead" behind his back." Posner asserts also that "Douglas's judicial oeuvre is slipshod and slapdash," but Douglas's "intelligence, his energy, his academic and government experience, his flair for writing, the leadership skills that he had displayed at the SEC, and his ability to charm when he bothered to try" could have let him "become the greatest justice in history." Brennan once stated that Douglas was one of only "two geniuses" he had met in his life (the other being Posner).

Judicial philosophy
In general, legal scholars have noted that Douglas's judicial style was unusual in that he did not attempt to elaborate justifications for his judicial positions on the basis of text, history, or precedent. Douglas was known for writing short, pithy opinions which relied on philosophical insights, observations about current politics, and literature, as much as more conventional judicial sources. Douglas wrote many of his opinions in twenty minutes, often publishing the first draft. Douglas was also known for his fearsome work ethic, by publishing over thirty books and once telling an exhausted secretary, Fay Aull, "If you hadn't stopped working, you wouldn't be tired."

Douglas frequently disagreed with the other justices, dissenting in almost 40% of cases, more than half of the time writing only for himself. Ronald Dworkin would conclude that because Douglas believed his convictions were merely "a matter of his own emotional biases," Douglas would fail to meet "minimal intellectual responsibilities." Ultimately, Douglas believed that a judge's role was "not neutral" as "The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of the people."

Douglas has been widely characterized as a civil libertarian. On the bench, Douglas became known as a strong advocate of First Amendment rights. With fellow justice Hugo Black, Douglas argued for a "literalist" interpretation of the First Amendment, insisting that the First Amendment's command that "no law" shall restrict freedom of speech should be interpreted literally. He wrote the opinion in Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949), overturning the conviction of a Catholic priest who allegedly caused a "breach of the peace" by making anti-Semitic comments during a raucous public speech. Douglas, joined by Black, furthered his advocacy of a broad reading of First Amendment rights by dissenting from the Supreme Court's decision in Dennis v. United States (1952), which affirmed the conviction of the leader of the U.S. Communist Party. Douglas was publicly critical of censorship, saying "The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth."

In 1944, Douglas voted with the majority to uphold the wartime internment of Japanese Americans in Korematsu v. United States after having initially planned to dissent, a vote he later regretted, but, over the course of his career, he grew to become a leading advocate of individual rights. He was suspicious of majority rule as it related to social and moral questions, and frequently expressed concern about forced conformity with "the Establishment". For example, Douglas wrote the decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) in stating that a constitutional right to privacy forbids state contraception bans because "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance." That went too far for Hugo Black, who dissented in Griswold despite having been allies with Douglas. Justice Clarence Thomas would years later hang a sign in his chambers reading, "Please don't emanate in the penumbras." Conservative Judge Robert Bork had no objection to the concept of penumbras, writing, "There is nothing exceptional about [Douglas's] thought, other than the language of penumbras and emanations. Courts often give protection to a constitutional freedom by creating a buffer zone, by prohibiting a government from doing something not in itself forbidden but likely to lead to an invasion of a right specified in the Constitution." Prof. David P. Currie of the University of Chicago Law School called Douglas's Griswold opinion "one of the most hypocritical opinions in the history of the Court."

Douglas and Black also disagreed in Fortson v. Morris (1967), which cleared the path for the Georgia State Legislature to choose the governor in the deadlocked 1966 race between Democrat Lester Maddox and Republican Howard Callaway. Whereas Black voted with the majority under strict construction to uphold the state constitutional provision, Douglas and Abe Fortas dissented. According to Douglas, Georgia tradition would guarantee a Maddox victory but he had trailed Callaway by some 3,000 votes in the general election returns. Douglas also saw the issue as a continuation of the earlier decision Gray v. Sanders, which had struck down Georgia's County Unit System, a kind of electoral college formerly used to choose the governor. According to political scientists Andrew D. Martin and Kevin M. Quinn, he was by far the most liberal justice in the history of the Supreme Court with a Martin-Quinn score of -8 at his most liberal. He voted to strike down the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia, argued that the environment should be granted legal personhood, tried to declare the Vietnam War unconstitutional because Congress had never declared war, and generally showed an uncompromising defense of individual rights from which even stalwart liberals Brennan and Marshall shied away.

Douglas was notable as a public pre-Stonewall supporter of gay rights. Douglas dissented in Boutilier v. INS in which the Court ruled that gays and lesbians were included in the list of “psychopathic personalities” that Congress could deport, arguing that the term “psychopathic personality” was unconstitutionally vague, and even if it were not, not all gays and lesbians are psychopaths. In 1968, in a concurring opinion in the case of Flast v. Cohen, Douglas indicated that he did not believe in judicial restraint:

There has long been a school of thought here that the less the judiciary does, the better. It is often said that judicial intrusion should be infrequent, since it is "always attended with a serious evil, namely, that the correction of legislative mistakes comes from the outside, and the people thus lose the political experience, and the moral education and stimulus that come from fighting the question out in the ordinary way, and correcting their own errors"; that the effect of a participation by the judiciary in these processes is "to dwarf the political capacity of the people, and to deaden its sense of moral responsibility." J. Thayer, John Marshall 106, 107 (1901).¶ The late Edmond Cahn, who opposed that view, stated my philosophy. He emphasized the importance of the role that the federal judiciary was designed to play in guarding basic rights against majoritarian control. ... His description of our constitutional tradition was in these words: "Be not reasonable with inquisitions, anonymous informers, and secret files that mock American justice. Be not reasonable with punitive denationalizations, ex post facto deportations, labels of disloyalty, and all the other stratagems for outlawing human beings from the community of mankind. These devices have put us to shame. Exercise the full judicial power of the United States; nullify them, forbid them, and make us proud again." Can the Supreme Court Defend Civil Liberties? in Samuel, ed., Toward a Better America 132, 144 -145 (1968).

"Critics have sometimes charged that [Douglas] was result oriented and guilty of oversimplification; those who understand how he thought, and who share his compassion, conscience, and sense of fair dealing, see him as courageous and farsighted." "There is no necessary contradiction between these two views."

Rosenberg case
On June 17, 1953, Douglas granted a temporary stay of execution to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who had been convicted of selling the plans for the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The basis for the stay was that Judge Irving Kaufman had sentenced the Rosenbergs to death without the consent of the jury. While this was permissible under the Espionage Act of 1917, under which the Rosenbergs were tried, a later law, the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, held that only a jury could pronounce the death penalty. Since at the time the stay was granted the Supreme Court was out of session, this stay meant that the Rosenbergs could expect to wait at least six months before the case was heard.

When Attorney General Herbert Brownell heard about the stay, however, he immediately took his objection to Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, who reconvened the Court before the appointed date and set aside the stay. Douglas had departed for vacation, but on learning of the special session of the Court, he returned to Washington. Because of widespread opposition to his decision, Douglas briefly faced impeachment proceedings in Congress but attempts to remove him from the Court went nowhere.

Vietnam War
Douglas took strong positions on the Vietnam War. In 1952, Douglas traveled to Vietnam and met with Ho Chi Minh. During the trip Douglas became friendly with Ngo Dinh Diem and in 1953 he personally introduced the nationalist leader to senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy. Douglas became one of the chief promoters for U.S. support of Diem, with CIA deputy director Robert Amory crediting Diem becoming "our man in Indochina" to a conversation with Douglas during a party at Martin Agronsky's house.

After Diem's assassination in November 1963, Douglas became strongly critical of the war, believing Diem had been killed because he "was not sufficiently servile to Pentagon demands." Douglas now outspokenly argued the war was illegal, dissenting whenever the Court passed on an opportunity to hear such claims. In 1968 Douglas issued an order blocking the shipment of Army reservists to Vietnam, before the eight other justices unanimously reversed him.

In Schlesinger v. Holtzman (1973) Justice Thurgood Marshall issued an in-chambers opinion declining Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman's request for a court order stopping the military from bombing Cambodia. The Court was in recess for the summer but the Congresswoman reapplied, this time to Douglas. Douglas met with Holtzman's ACLU lawyers at his home in Goose Prairie, Washington, and promised them a hearing the next day. On Friday, August 3, 1973, Douglas held a hearing in the Yakima federal courthouse, where he dismissed the Government's argument that he was causing a "constitutional confrontation" by saying, "we live in a world of confrontations. That's what the whole system is about." On August 4, Douglas ordered the military to stop bombing, reasoning "denial of the application before me would catapult our airmen as well as Cambodian peasants into the death zone." The U.S. military ignored Douglas's order. Six hours later the eight other justices reconvened by telephone for a special term and unanimously overturned Douglas's ruling.

"Trees have standing"
Douglas was highly innovative in legal theory. For example, in his dissenting opinion in the landmark environmental law case Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972), Douglas argued that "inanimate objects" should have standing to sue in court:

"The critical question of 'standing' would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage. Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. This suit would therefore be more properly labeled as Mineral King v. Morton."

He continued:

"Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole—a creature of ecclesiastical law—is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases ... So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes—fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it."

Environmentalism
Douglas was a lifelong mountaineer. In his autobiographical Of Men and Mountains (1950), Douglas discusses his close childhood connections with nature. In the 1950s, proposals were made to create a highway along the path of the C&O Canal, which ran on the Maryland bank parallel to the Potomac River. The Washington Post editorial page supported the action. However, Douglas, who frequently hiked on the Canal towpath, opposed the plan and challenged reporters to hike the 185-mile length of the Canal with him. After the hike, the Post changed its stance and advocated preservation of the Canal in its historic state. Douglas is widely credited with saving the Canal and with its eventual designation as a National Historic Park in 1971. He served on the board of directors of the Sierra Club from 1960 to 1962 and wrote prolifically on his love of the outdoors. In 1962, Douglas wrote a glowing review of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring, which was included in the widely-read Book-of-the-Month Club edition. He later swayed the Supreme Court to preserve the Red River Gorge in eastern Kentucky, when a proposal to build a dam and flood the gorge reached the Court. Douglas personally visited the area on November 18, 1967. The Red River Gorge's Douglas Trail is named in his honor.

In May 1962, Douglas and his wife, Cathleen, were invited by Neil Compton and the Ozark Society to visit and canoe down part of the free flowing Buffalo River in Arkansas. They put in at the low water bridge at Boxley. That experience made him a fan of the river and the young organization's idea of protecting it. Douglas was instrumental in having the Buffalo preserved as a free-flowing river left in its natural state. The decision was opposed by the region's Corps of Army Engineers. The act that soon followed designated the Buffalo River as America's first National River. Douglas was a self-professed outdoorsman. According to The Thru-Hiker's Companion, a guide published by the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association, Douglas hiked the entire 2000 mi trail from Georgia to Maine. His love for the environment carried through to his judicial reasoning. His interests in natural history are also reflected in the fact that he collected plant specimens for the herbarium of the University of Texas at Austin. They curate at least 14 vascular plant specimens collected by Douglas together with botanist Donovan Stewart Correll, Head of the Botanical Laboratory, Texas Research Foundation in February and June 1965. The specimens collected in February were from Presidio and Brewster Counties—several from Capote Falls. The specimens collected in June were from Blanco, Gillespie, and Llano Counties—near Austin, Texas. The Rocky Mountain Herbarium at the University of Wyoming curates a lichen collected by William O. Douglas in Snoqualmie National Forest.

Douglas's active role in advocating the preservation and protection of wilderness across the United States earned him the nickname "Wild Bill". Douglas was a friend and frequent guest of Harry R. Truman, the owner of the Mount St. Helens Lodge at Spirit Lake in Washington.

In 1967, on a hike to save Sunfish Pond on the Appalachian Trail in New Jersey, Douglas was accompanied by more than a thousand people. He said: "It's a vital element in the need to save some of our wilderness from the encroachment of civilization."

Travel writing
From 1950 to 1961, Douglas travelled extensively in the Middle East and Asia. Douglas wrote many books about his experiences and observations during these trips. Other than writers from National Geographic—whom he sometimes met on the road—Douglas was one of the few American travel writers to visit these remote regions during this period in time. His travel books include:
 * Strange Lands and Friendly People (1950)
 * Beyond the High Himalayas (1952)
 * North From Malaya (1953)
 * Russian Journey (1956)
 * Exploring the Himalaya (1958)
 * West of the Indus (1958)
 * My Wilderness, The Pacific West (1960)
 * My Wilderness, East to Katahdin (1961)

In his memoir, The Court Years, Douglas wrote that he was sometimes criticized for taking too much time off from the bench, and writing travel books while on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, Douglas maintained that the travel gave him a world-wide perspective that was helpful in resolving cases before the Court. It also gave him a perspective on political systems that did not benefit from the legal protections in the American Constitution.

Presidential politics
When, in early 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided not to support the renomination of Vice President Henry A. Wallace at the party's national convention, a short list of possible replacements was drafted. The names on the list included former senator and Supreme Court justice James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, former senator (and future Supreme Court justice) Sherman Minton, former governor and high commissioner to the Philippines Paul McNutt of Indiana, House speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, and Douglas.

Five days before the vice presidential nominee was to be chosen at the convention, on July 15, Committee chairman Robert E. Hannegan received a letter from Roosevelt stating that his choice for the nominee would be either "Harry Truman or Bill Douglas". After Hannegan released the letter to the convention on July 20, the nomination went without incident, and Truman was nominated on the second ballot. Douglas received two votes on the second ballot and none on the first.

After the convention, Douglas's supporters spread the rumor that the note sent to Hannegan had read "Bill Douglas or Harry Truman", not the other way around. These supporters claimed that Hannegan, a Truman supporter, feared that Douglas's nomination would drive Southern white voters away from the ticket (Douglas had a strong anti-segregation record on the Supreme Court) and had switched the names to suggest that Truman was Roosevelt's real choice.

By 1948, Douglas's presidential aspirations were rekindled by Truman's low popularity, after he had succeeded Roosevelt in 1945. Many Democrats, believing that Truman could not be elected in November, began trying to find a replacement candidate. Attempts were made to draft popular retired General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a war hero, for the nomination. A "Draft Douglas" campaign, complete with souvenir buttons and hats, sprang up in New Hampshire and several other primary states. Douglas campaigned for the nomination for a short time, but he soon withdrew his name from consideration.

In the end, Eisenhower refused to be drafted, and Truman won nomination easily. Although Truman approached Douglas about the vice presidential nomination, the justice turned him down. Douglas's close associate Tommy Corcoran was later heard to ask, "Why be a number two man to a number two man?" Truman selected Senator Alben W. Barkley and the two won the election.

Impeachment attempts
Political opponents made two unsuccessful attempts to remove Douglas from the Supreme Court.

Rosenberg case
On June 17, 1953, U.S. Representative William M. Wheeler of Georgia, infuriated by Douglas's brief stay of execution in the Rosenberg case, introduced a resolution to impeach him. The resolution was referred the next day to the Judiciary Committee to investigate the charges. On July 7, 1953, the committee voted to end the investigation.

1970 impeachment attempt fails
Douglas maintained a busy speaking and publishing schedule to supplement his income. He became severely burdened financially because of a bitter divorce and settlement with his first wife. He sustained additional financial setbacks after divorces and settlements with his second and third wives.

Douglas became president of the Parvin Foundation. His ties to the foundation (which was financed by the sale of the infamous Flamingo Hotel by casino financier and foundation benefactor Albert Parvin) became a prime target for House Minority Leader Gerald Ford. Besides being personally disgusted by Douglas's lifestyle, Ford was also mindful that Douglas's protégé Abe Fortas was forced to resign because of ties to a similar foundation. Fortas would later say that he "resigned to save Douglas," thinking that the dual investigations of himself and Douglas would stop with his resignation.

Some scholars have argued that Ford's impeachment attempt was politically motivated. Those who support this contention note Ford's well-known disappointment with the Senate over the failed nominations of Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell to succeed Fortas. In April 1970, Ford moved to impeach Douglas in an attempt to hit back at the Senate. House Judiciary Chairman Emanuel Celler handled the case carefully and did not uncover evidence of any criminal conduct by Douglas. Attorney General John N. Mitchell and the Nixon administration worked to gather evidence against him. Ford moved forward with the proceedings.

The hearings began in late April 1970. Ford was the main witness, and attacked Douglas's "liberal opinions", his "defense of the 'filthy' film", the controversial Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow) (1970), and his ties to Parvin. Douglas was also criticized for accepting $350 for an article he wrote on folk music in the magazine Avant Garde. Its publisher had served a prison sentence for the distribution of another magazine in 1966 that had been deemed obscene by some critics. Describing Douglas's article, Ford stated, "The article itself is not pornographic, although it praises the lusty, lurid, and risqué along with the social protest of left-wing folk singers." Ford also attacked Douglas for publishing an article in Evergreen Review, which he claimed was known to publish photographs of naked women. The Republican congressmen, however, refused to give the majority Democrats copies of the magazines described, prompting Congressman Wayne Hays to remark, "Has anybody read the article – or is everybody over there who has a magazine just looking at the pictures?" As it became clear that the impeachment proceedings would be unsuccessful, they were brought to a close without a public vote.

According to Joshua E. Kastenberg of the University of New Mexico School of Law, there were several purposes behind Ford's and Nixon's push to have Douglas impeached. First, while it was true that Nixon and Ford were angered at the Senate's determination not to confirm Haynsworth and Carswell, Nixon had a deep-seated hatred of Douglas. An attempt to have Douglas impeached and then brought to a Senate trial would further cement the alleged "Southern Strategy", as most of Ford's congressional allies against Douglas were Southern Democrats. Additionally, Nixon and Kissinger had secretly planned for an April 30 – May 1 invasion of Cambodia and Nixon thought that there was a possibility of using a House investigation into Douglas to deflect news coverage. Professor Kastenberg notes in his recent book on the subject that Attorney General John Mitchell and his deputy, William Wilson, had promised Ford that the Central Intelligence Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had evidence of Douglas's criminal conduct. In the end, however, none of these agencies had any evidence of wrongdoing by Douglas, but the promise led Ford to accuse Douglas of consorting with organized crime and Communists, and therefore of being a threat to national security.

Around this time, Douglas came to believe that strangers snooping around his Washington home were FBI agents, attempting to plant marijuana to entrap him. In a private letter to his neighbors, he said: "I wrote you last fall or winter that federal agents were in Yakima and Goose Prairie looking me over at Goose Prairie. I thought they were merely counting fence posts. But I learned in New York City yesterday that they were planting marijuana with the prospect of a nice big TV-covered raid in July or August.  I forgot to tell you that this gang in power is not in search of truth. They are 'search and destroy' people."

Judicial record-setter
During his tenure on the Supreme Court, Douglas set a number of records, all of which still stand. He sat on the U.S. Supreme Court for more than thirty-six years (1939–75), longer than any other justice. During those years, he wrote some thirty books in addition to his opinions and dissenting opinions and gave more speeches than any other justice. Douglas had the most marriages (four) and the most divorces (three) of any justice serving on the bench.

Nicknames
During his time on the Supreme Court, Douglas picked up a number of nicknames from both admirers and detractors. The most common epithet was "Wild Bill" in reference to his independent and often-unpredictable stances and his cowboy-style mannerisms, but many of the latter were considered by some to be affectations for the consumption of the press.

Retirement
Since the 1970 impeachment hearings, Douglas had wanted to retire from the Court. He wrote to his friend and former student Abe Fortas: "My ideas are way out of line with current trends, and I see no particular point in staying around and being obnoxious." However, he did not want to do so when a Republican was in the White House and would nominate his successor, saying "I won't resign while there's a breath in my body —until we get a Democratic President." At 76 on December 31, 1974, on vacation with his wife Cathleen in the Bahamas, Douglas suffered a debilitating stroke in the right hemisphere of his brain. It paralyzed his left leg and forced him to use a wheelchair. Douglas was severely disabled but insisted on continuing to participate in Supreme Court affairs despite his obvious incapacity. Seven of his fellow justices (with Byron White vehemently disagreeing) voted to postpone until the next term any argued case in which Douglas's vote might make a difference. Douglas finally retired on November 12, 1975, after 36 years of service. He had been the last serving Supreme Court justice to have been appointed by Roosevelt. Indeed, Douglas had outlasted the last of Harry S. Truman's appointments by eight years and was the last sitting justice to have served on the Hughes, Stone, and Vinson Courts.

Douglas's formal resignation was submitted, as required by federal protocols, to his longtime political nemesis, then-President Gerald Ford. In his response, Ford put aside previous differences and paid tribute to the retiring justice:"May I express on behalf of all our countrymen this nation's great gratitude for your more than thirty-six years as a member of the Supreme Court. Your distinguished years of service are unequaled in all the history of the Court."

Ford hosted William and Cathleen Douglas as honored guests at a White House state dinner later that month. Ford later said of the occasion, "We had had differences in the past, but I wanted to stress that bygones were bygones."

Douglas maintained that he could assume judicial senior status on the Court and attempted to continue serving in that capacity, according to authors Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong. He refused to accept his retirement and tried to participate in the Court's cases well into 1976, after John Paul Stevens had taken his former seat. Douglas reacted with outrage when, returning to his old chambers, he discovered that his clerks had been reassigned to Stevens and when he tried to file opinions for cases in which he had heard arguments before his retirement, Chief Justice Warren Burger ordered all justices, clerks, and other staff members to refuse help to Douglas in those efforts. When Douglas tried in March 1976 to hear arguments in a capital-punishment case, Gregg v. Georgia, the nine sitting justices signed a formal letter informing him that his retirement had ended his official duties on the Court. It was only then that Douglas withdrew from Supreme Court business.

One commentator has attributed some of his behavior after his stroke to anosognosia, which can lead an affected person to be unaware and unable to acknowledge disease in himself, and often results in defects in reasoning, decision-making, emotions, and feeling.

Personal life
Douglas's first wife was Mildred Riddle, a teacher at North Yakima High School six years his senior, whom he married on August 16, 1923. They had two children, Mildred and William Jr. William Douglas Jr. became an actor, playing Gerald Zinser in PT 109.

On October 2, 1949, Douglas had thirteen of his ribs broken after he got thrown by a horse and he tumbled down a rocky hillside. As a result of his injuries, Douglas did not return to the Court until March 1950 and did not take part in many of that term's cases. Four months after his return to the court, Douglas had to be hospitalized again when he was kicked by a horse.

Douglas divorced Riddle in July 1953. Douglas's former friend Thomas Gardiner Corcoran represented Riddle in the divorce, securing alimony with an "escalator clause" that gave Douglas a financial motivation to publish more books. Douglas was not informed about Riddle's 1969 death until several months had passed because his children had stopped talking to him.

While still married to Riddle, Douglas began openly pursuing Mercedes Hester Davidson in 1951. Other justices at the time kept mistresses as secretaries or kept them away from the Court building according to Douglas's messenger Harry Datcher, but Douglas "did what he did in the open. He didn't give a damn what people thought of him." Douglas married Davidson on December 14, 1954.

In 1961, Douglas pursued Joan "Joanie" Martin, an Allegheny College student writing her thesis about him. In the summer of 1963, he divorced Davidson; on August 5, 1963, at the age of 64, Douglas married 23-year-old Martin. Douglas and Martin divorced in 1966.

On July 15, 1966, Douglas married Cathleen Heffernan, then a 22-year-old student at Marylhurst College. They met when he was vacationing at Mount St. Helens Lodge, a mountain wilderness lodge in Washington state at Spirit Lake, where she was working for the summer as a waitress. Though their age difference was a subject of national controversy at the time of their marriage, they remained together until his death in 1980.

For much of his life, Douglas was dogged by various rumors and allegations about his private life, originating from political rivals and other detractors of his liberal legal opinions on the Court—often a matter of controversy. In one such instance in 1966, Republican Representative Bob Dole of Kansas attributed his court decisions to his "bad judgment from a matrimonial standpoint". Several other Republican members of Congress introduced resolutions in the House of Representatives, though none ever passed, that called for investigation of Douglas's moral character.

Daniel Pierce Thompson was Douglas's great-granduncle.

Death
Four years after retiring from the Supreme Court, Douglas died on January 19, 1980, at age 81, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. He was survived by his fourth wife, Cathleen Douglas, and two children, Mildred and William Jr., with his first wife.

Douglas is interred in Section 5 of Arlington National Cemetery near the graves of eight other former Supreme Court justices: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Warren E. Burger, William Rehnquist, Hugo Black, Potter Stewart, William J. Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun. Throughout his life Douglas claimed he had been a U.S. Army private during World War I, which was inscribed on his headstone. Some historians, including biographer Bruce Murphy, asserted that this claim was false,   although Murphy later added, according to Washington Post editorial writer Charles Lane, that Douglas's "career on the court makes it 'appropriate'" that he be buried in Arlington Cemetery.

Lane engaged in further research—consulting applicable provisions of the relevant federal statutes, locating Douglas's honorable discharge and speaking with Arlington Cemetery staff. Records in the Library of Congress showed that from June to December 1918, Douglas served in the SATC as (what the War Department's regulations termed) "a soldier in the Army of the United States ... placed upon active-duty status immediately." Tom Sherlock, Arlington's official historian, told Lane that an "active-duty recruit whose service was limited to boot camp would qualify" to be buried in Arlington. Lane therefore concluded, "Legally, then, Douglas may have had a plausible claim to be a 'Private, U.S. Army,' as his headstone at Arlington reads."

Legacy and honors

 * In 1962, Douglas was awarded the National Audubon Society's highest honor, the Audubon Medal.
 * The 1984 Washington Wilderness Act designated the Cougar Lake Roadless area as the William O. Douglas Wilderness, which adjoins Mount Rainier National Park in Washington State.
 * Douglas Falls, in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, is supposedly named for him.
 * The William O. Douglas Outdoor Classroom in Beverly Hills, California, is named for him.
 * Douglas was elected to the Ecology Hall of Fame for his dedication to conservation.
 * The William O. Douglas Honors College at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, is named for him.
 * The William O. Douglas Federal Building, a historic post office, courthouse, and federal office building in Yakima, Washington, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, was renamed in his honor in 1978.
 * Since 1972, the William O. Douglas Committee, a select group of law students at Gonzaga University School of Law in Spokane, Washington, has sponsored a series of lectures on the First Amendment in Douglas's honor. Douglas was the first speaker for the annual series.
 * A statue of Douglas was installed at A.C. Davis High School, in Yakima, Washington. It was dedicated in 1978 to Douglas when the new school was opened.
 * William O. Douglas Hall was named in his honor at his alma mater, Whitman College.
 * Douglas Hall, apartments for continuing students at Earl Warren College, at the University of California, San Diego, is named for him as well.
 * In 1977, a bust of Douglas was erected along the towpath of the C & O Canal in Georgetown in Washington, D.C, and the C & O Canal National Historical Park was officially dedicated to Douglas in honor of his exhaustive efforts dating from the 1950s in support of preserving the historic canal. In 1998, the Park commemorated the 100th Anniversary of Douglas's birth by unveiling a portrait of Justice Douglas hiking along the towpath by artist Tom Kozar. The portrait, commissioned by the C&O Canal Association, now hangs in the Great Falls Tavern Visitor Center.
 * Douglas Trail, which leads to the Appalachian Trail and Sunfish Pond in New Jersey, is named after him.
 * Mountain - The Journey of Justice Douglas is a play written by Douglas Scott which explores the life of William O. Douglas. Produced in 1990 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York, NY.

In popular culture

 * The 1960s television sitcom Green Acres starred Eddie Albert as a character named Oliver Wendell Douglas, a Manhattan white-shoe lawyer who gives up the law to become a farmer. His name is a combination of two Supreme Court Justices, Douglas and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Environmentalism

 * Brinkley, Douglas. Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening (2022) excerpt. chapter 4 on Douglas.
 * Caragher, James M. "The Wilderness Ethic of Justice William O. Douglas." University of Illinois Law Review (1986): 645+. online
 * Douglas, William O., and Joseph W. Meeker. "Nature’s Constitutional Rights." The North American Review, 258#1 (1973), pp. 11–14. online
 * Douglas, William O. Of men and mountains (1990) online, a memoir
 * Douglas, William O. The three hundred year war: A chronicle of ecological disaster (1972) online
 * Douglas, William O. My wilderness: the Pacific West (1960) online
 * Huber, Richard G. "William O. Douglas and the Environment," Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review  (1976), 5:209-212 online
 * McKeown, M. Margaret. Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas—Public Advocate and Conservation Champion (U of Nebraska Press, 2022).
 * Sowards, Adam M. The Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation Oregon State University Press, 2009).
 * Sowards, Adam M. " 'He's a Natural': Justice William O. Douglas and the American Environmental Tradition" (PhD Dissertation, Arizona State University; ProQuest Dissertations Publishing,  2001. 3004138).
 * Sowards, Adam M. "Protecting American Lands with Justice William O. Douglas." The George Wright Forum 32#2 (2015) pp. 165–173..
 * Wilkinson, Charles F. "Justice Douglas and the Public Lands." In "He Shall Not Pass This Way Again": The Legacy of Justice William O. Douglas, ed. Stephen L. Wasby, (1990) pp 233–248.

title: William O. Douglas