Douglas, William O

Douglas, William O(rville)

(born , Oct. 16, 1898, Maine, Minn., U.S.—died Jan. 19, 1980, Washington, D.C.) U.S. jurist and public official. He attended Columbia University Law School, where he edited the law review and graduated second in his class. After learning the intricacies of financial and corporate law at a Wall Street law firm, he joined the law faculty at Yale, where he taught until 1936. He became a member of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1936. As SEC chairman (1937–39) he engineered the reorganization of the country's stock exchanges, instituted measures for the protection of small investors, and began government regulation of the sale of securities (see security). In 1939 Pres. Franklin Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court of the United States, on which he served until 1975. Although responsible for writing opinions in many complicated financial cases, he became most famous for his pronouncements on civil liberties (see civil liberty). He rejected government limitations on freedom of speech and was an outspoken defender of an unfettered press. He also strove to uphold the rights of the accused. He wrote numerous books on history, politics, foreign relations, and conservation, including Of Men and Mountains (1950) and A Wilderness Bill of Rights (1965).