ABSTRACT
For almost thirty-seven years William O. Douglas, an activist for liberal causes and underdog individuals, served as conscience of the nation from his chair on the US Supreme Court. He had the longest tenure of any justice in the history of the tribunal, participating in more than 1,200 decisions and filing 795 dissents. Douglas and Hugo L. Black were allies on the Court for thirty years. They had an absolutist belief that the First Amendment forbade any judicial restraint on speech and press. They argued, at first in dissent, that the Bill of Rights was applicable to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Douglas grew up in the state of Washington. He attended Whitman College and went to New York to attend Columbia University Law School, where he graduated second in his class.
