Douglas, William O.

William Orville Douglas (1898–1980) was born in Maine, Minnesota, and died in Washington, D.C., after the longest U.S. Supreme Court service of any justice. Douglas was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 to succeed Louis D. Brandeis. When Douglas took the seat on the Court formerly held by his mentor Brandeis, he carried on the latter's belief in a right to privacy protected by the Constitution. Brandeis had written of “the right to be let alone” in his dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928). Douglas adopted a similar concept, including the notion that the Fourth Amendment protected people, rather than just places, from the intrusion of government. He articulated this view in a number of search and seizure opinions, as well as in his most famous privacy holding, Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965).

Prior to his service on the Supreme Court, Douglas taught at Yale Law School and practiced law on Wall Street. When Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to monitor the stock market, Roosevelt chose Douglas as a member and later as SEC chair. During his long tenure on the Court, Douglas served under five chief justices (Charles Evans Hughes, Harlan Fiske Stone, Fred Vinson, Earl Warren, and Warren Burger) and saw the judiciary pass through several philosophical phases. Douglas, who had [Page 221]suffered both poverty and polio in his youth, perceived himself as a spokesman on the Court for “outsiders.” In 1975, after thirty-six years of service and a judicial career marked by advocacy for civil liberties, he retired from the Court.

Douglas's time on the Supreme Court spanned the period during which the justices, through a series of rulings, determined that most provisions of the Bill of Rights, including the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures, applied to the states. Although he was in the minority at the time, Douglas held this view as early as the 1940s, when he dissented from the Court's holding in Wolf v. Colorado (1949). In that case, a majority held that evidence illegally seized by the police could be introduced in state courts. In 1961, however, Douglas voted with a new majority to overrule Wolf and to apply the Fourth Amendment to the states. Mapp v. Ohio (1967) held that evidence illegally seized by agents of the states must be excluded in court. The opinion in Mapp implied a guarantee of privacy in the home, noting that without the exclusionary rule, the idea of privacy was “an empty promise.”

Douglas wrote a dissenting opinion in Frank v. Maryland (1959). In this case, the Court upheld a warrantless administrative search of a home by health inspectors. Although the majority found the inspection was routine and not a criminal investigation and therefore did not require a warrant, Douglas disagreed. He claimed that the decision diluted the right to privacy in one's home, which he considered among the “indispensible ultimate essentials of our concept of civilization.” The Court came around to Douglas's view in two 1967 cases, Camara v. Municipal Court (1967) and See v. Seattle (1967), in which the justices found that health inspections of a private home and fire inspections at a warehouse did require warrants. However, Douglas again dissented in Wyman v. James (1971), a case concerning whether a mother could be denied welfare payments because she refused to let a caseworker enter her home without a warrant. The majority held that the visit was not a search under the Fourth Amendment, or, if it was a search, it was not unreasonable. Douglas in dissent wrote that the question was whether welfare benefits made the home of a recipient open to intrusion by agents of the government. He saw a class-based application of the Constitution. In particular he took issue with the notion that the poverty of the welfare beneficiary made her home more vulnerable to search than the homes of prosperous businessmen who held government contracts.

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