William O. Douglas

William Orville Douglas (October 16, 1898 – January 19, 1980) served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Nominated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Douglas was confirmed at the age of 40, one of the youngest justices appointed to the court. His term, lasting 36 years and 209 days (1939–75), is the longest term in the history of the Supreme Court.

Douglas holds a number of records as a Supreme Court Justice, including the most opinions. He was the 79th person appointed and confirmed to the bench of that court. In 1975 Time magazine called Douglas "the most doctrinaire and committed civil libertarian ever to sit on the court".

Early life and education

Douglas was born in 1898 in Maine Township, Otter Tail County, Minnesota, the son of Julia Bickford (Fisk) and William Douglas, an itinerant Scottish Presbyterian minister from Pictou County, Nova Scotia. His family moved to California, and then to Cleveland, Washington.

His father died in Portland, Oregon, in 1904, when Douglas was six years old. After moving the family from town to town in the West, his mother, with three young children, settled with them in Yakima, Washington. William, like the rest of the Douglas family, worked at 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 scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

O. Douglas

Anna Masterton Buchan (1877–1948) was a Scottish novelist who wrote under the pen name O. Douglas. Most of her novels were written and set between the wars and portrayed small town or village life in southern Scotland, reflecting her own life.

Anna Buchan was born in Pathhead, Scotland, the daughter of the Reverend John Buchan and Helen Masterton. She was the younger sister of John Buchan, the renowned statesman and author. She attended Hutchesons' Grammar School in Glasgow, but lived most of her later life in Peebles in the Scottish border country, not far from the village of Broughton where her parents first met.

Her first novel Olivia in India was published in 1912 by Hodder & Stoughton. Unforgettable, Unforgotten (1945) is a memoir of her brother John and of the Buchan family, while Farewell to Priorsford is her autobiography, published posthumously in 1950.

Her work is displayed alongside her brother's at the John Buchan Museum in Peebles.

Literary style and reception

A contemporary review describes Olivia in India as a "happy book" and another commented: "To have read this book is to have met an extremely likeable personality in the author". This was to be the hallmark of all her fiction, gently humorous domestic dramas with little if any reference to political events or social change. Merren Strang, a character in Pink Sugar who writes novels similar to those of O. Douglas, describes her impulse to write "something very simple that would make pleasant reading — you see, there's nothing of Art for Art's sake about me". Merren later quotes one of her reviews, "'This is a book about good, gentle, scrupulous people who live on the bright side of life'", banteringly describing herself as circumscribed as a novelist by only having met decent people, and thus being unable to create convincing "ape and tiger sort of people" like the "strong novelists" of the day.

Supreme court

A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of many legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, instance court, judgment court, apex court, and highest court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of a supreme court are not subject to further review by any other court. Supreme courts typically function primarily as appellate courts, hearing appeals from decisions of lower trial courts, or from intermediate-level appellate courts.

However, not all highest courts are named as such. Civil law states do not tend to have singular highest courts. Additionally, the highest court in some jurisdictions is not named the "Supreme Court", for example, the High Court of Australia; this is because decisions by the High Court could formerly be appealed to the Privy Council. On the other hand, in some places the court named the "Supreme Court" is not in fact the highest court; examples include the New York Supreme Court, the Supreme Courts of several Canadian provinces/territories and the former Supreme Court of Judicature of England and Wales, which are all superseded by higher Courts of Appeal.

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