Today, law professors are commemorating the birth of the left-wing Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who was born on this day in 1898, and served on the Supreme Court until 1975. No other Supreme Court justice has ever committed sexual assault as avidly and blatantly as Douglas did, yet journalists venerated him as a “cool cat” in spite of that.
Because of how often he ruled in favor of criminals and against businesses while on the Supreme Court, Douglas is venerated by progressives. A progressive New York lawyer wrote today, “Justice William O. Douglas gets a lot of ridicule, some earned, but still had an impressive career as teacher, regulator, judge, environmentalist, and writer. His opinion style could be lazy but he had moments of greatness. His fourth wife (who he married in his late 60s while she was in her twenties) is still alive. She became a lawyer and later remarried. Cathy Douglas Stone sometimes goes to Supreme Court events.”
But Justice Douglas was a creep. As a lawyer points out:
William O. Douglas sexually assaulted countless women, even groping judges’ wives in front of their husbands at judicial conferences, as the late Lawrence T. Lydick, a federal judge in California, recounted. At the following link is a retired lawyer’s description of some of the misbehavior of Justice Douglas, which was legendary…..
William O. Douglas committed sexual assault on an industrial scale, as older lawyers like Scott Greenfield & Jerome Woehrle have pointed out.
As Mr. Woehrle observed:
“Douglas was ‘a compulsive sexual harasser, who repeatedly assaulted women, as any number of court employees attested. … Justice Douglas would show up to judicial conferences and grope even the wives of federal judges, triggering fistfights with men whose wives he sexually assaulted.’ As Richard Posner, former Chief Judge of the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, has observed: ‘Apart from being a flagrant liar, Douglas was a compulsive womanizer, a heavy drinker, a terrible husband to each of his four wives, a terrible father to his two children, and a bored, distracted, uncollegial, irresponsible, and at times unethical Supreme Court justice.’”
As Scott Greenfield observed (at https://blog.simplejustice.us/2018/10/27/law-without-douglas/):
“He propositioned the wives of law clerks, groped unsuspecting female visitors to the court, and one occasion hid a wife-to-be in his office closet to prevent her from being discovered by a current spouse….As Michael Medved and Jerome Woehrle have noted, Justice Douglas apparently engaged in acts that today would be considered textbook examples of sexual harassment.”
Douglas is still venerated by leftists because he gave them Supreme Court rulings they liked, even if his legal reasoning often didn’t make much sense. Progressive federal appeals court Judge Margaret McKeown recently called him a “legal giant” because of his rulings. But his rulings twisted logic and precedent into a pretzel. He made things up out of thin air. As Justice Douglas’s own former law clerk, Stephen Duke, admitted, “Few law professors are unabashed admirers of the work of Justice Douglas. His opinions were terse” to the point of paying little attention to precedent and the purpose of constitutional provisions. Moreover, “Douglas’s opinions were often obscure in their reasoning and even their holdings. Many were drafted in twenty minutes. Some were written on the bench during oral argument. … His published opinions often read like rough drafts.”
But as attorney Greenfield notes, “he wasn’t quite so respected by his colleagues” on the Supreme Court. Greenfield cites an article at Bloomberg News, which points out that Douglas
was married four times, each time to progressively younger women. As the alimonies added up, he needed cash and ended up relying on secret payments from a shady businessman. People said that Douglas loved humanity and hated people. Such was his obsessive hatred of [his colleague Justice Felix] Frankfurter that he dubbed the Austrian-born Jewish justice “Der Fuhrer” — during the Holocaust. Frankfurter called Douglas “one of the two completely evil men I have ever met.”
While Douglas hasn’t been canceled for his odious ways, far better Republican figures have been canceled by the woke. For example, a statue of Republican President Ulysses Grant was torn down. The reason for tearing down his statue was that he once briefly owned a slave that he had been given. But he voluntarily freed that slave in 1859, before the Civil War, and long before slavery was abolished. The enslaved person was better off for having come into contact with Grant, who converted him from a slave into a free man, at enormous expense to Grant. Given how valuable slaves were economically, and the high price they could fetch on the market, very few people who inherited slaves freed them. Grant was unusually principled in freeing a slave despite having financial struggles of his own.
Ulysses Grant is the general who did the most to defeat the Confederacy in the Civil War. Later, as president of the United States, he appointed black people and Native Americans to office and tried to protect blacks against racist violence in the South, even though keeping federal troops in the South to protect blacks was costly and unpopular in the North. Grant’s contributions to black freedom were so great that he was celebrated by the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “To him, more than to any other man, the Negro owes his enfranchisement,” Douglass said. Douglass eulogized Grant as “a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest, too great to be small at any point. In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother, an imperiled nation a savior.”
