William J O Neil Popular Books

William J O Neil Biography & Facts

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). 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 an 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 Com.... Discover the William J O Neil popular books. Find the top 100 most popular William J O Neil books.