CITIZEN JUSTICE: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas—Public Advocate and Conservation Champion

CITIZEN JUSTICE: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas—Public Advocate and Conservation Champion
Hon. M. MARGARET McKEOWN
Potomac Books
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was a giant in the legal world, even if he is often remembered for his four wives, as a potential vice-presidential nominee, as a target of impeachment proceedings, and for his tenure as the longest-serving justice from 1939 to 1975. His most enduring legacy, however, is perhaps his advocacy for the environment.

Douglas was the spiritual heir to early twentieth-century conservation pioneers such as Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. His personal spiritual mantra embraced nature as a place of solitude, sanctuary, and refuge. Caught in the giant expansion of America’s urban and transportation infrastructure after World War II, Douglas became a powerful leader in forging the ambitious goals of today’s environmental movement. And, in doing so, Douglas became a true citizen justice.

In a way unthinkable today, Douglas ran a one-man lobby shop from his chambers at the U.S. Supreme Court, bringing him admiration from allies in conservation groups but raising ethical issues with his colleagues. He became a national figure through his books, articles, and speeches warning against environmental dangers. Douglas organized protest hikes to leverage his position as a national icon, he lobbied politicians and policymakers privately about everything from logging to highway construction and pollution, and he protested at the Supreme Court through his voluminous and passionate dissents.

Douglas made a lasting contribution to both the physical environment and environmental law—with trees still standing, dams unbuilt, and beaches protected as a result of his work. His merged roles as citizen advocate and justice also put him squarely in the center of ethical dilemmas that he never fully resolved. Citizen Justice elucidates the why and how of these tensions and their contemporary lessons against the backdrop of Douglas’s unparalleled commitment to the environment.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A book about a Supreme Court Justice, by a Federal judge. Oh dear, says your inner voice, all lawyers talk too much about dull stuff.

Nay nay nay, say I to the nay-sayer, this book is a pleasure to read. The author's prose is limpidly clear, and the way you know there's a legal mind at work is how *organized* the presentation of the book is. The author clearly admires Mr. Justice Douglas but doesn't shy away from pointing up his lapses of ethics...or morals, though she doesn't phrase it just so.

The man in his element...schmoozing the most powerful person on the planet
The life of a flawed, passionate man is always going to be good reading. The passions of his life were, like his personality, very large. He was not a man to everyone's taste. He was a crappy husband to four wives, each one younger than the last relative to his age. He was a passionate scribbler of books. I don't say "author" here because he appaarently had little interest in the craft and graft of revising and editing his extensive bibliography, which doesn't include his numerous Supreme Court opinions. The books themselves are largely out of the public awareness now, almost forty-five years after his death and fifty since he retired from the Supreme Court.

That's rather a pity because, despite his actions on behalf of the environment, as additional fodder for existing political animus directed at him, resulting in a 1970 attempt to impeach him (which to be honest had a great deal of validity, just not the kind that Nixon used against him). A love for the outdoors, and a famous habit of hiking through places he wanted saved from development and protected for the future, made him a media darling:

Always out for a chace to show people what they were...and are...missing by not getting themselves out into Nature.

Famously hiking the B&O Canal near Washington DC
It was a life fully lived, tainted by scandals he invited with his (mis)behaviors, marked by an uncompromising liberalism of political and social views, and spent in service of protecting the rights of powerless entities to the benefit of us all.

A fine leagcy, one I am sure he was pleased by...though I hope he developed enough as a person to realize there were things he did that it was not correct to be proud of. I prefer to think this of the man who dedicated huge resources protecting and preserving the world around us all.

We could use his like on our twenty-first century Supreme Court.