The papers of William Orville Douglas (1898-1980) span the years 1801 to 1980, with the heaviest concentration of material dated between 1923 and 1975. Although the collection is divided into three parts, some topics and time periods are common to all parts. Part I, dating from 1920 to 1953, focuses primarily on Douglas's professional life. Part II forms the bulk of the collection, and although it covers the years 180l to 1980, the earliest Douglas manuscript is dated 19l6. Part III is confined primarily to Douglas's diary and his personal correspondence with other justices of the United States Supreme Court. The collection consists of a small group of family papers, several correspondence series, subject files, speeches and writings, Supreme Court files, financial papers, photographs, miscellany, and printed matter.

Douglas's papers are as varied as his many interests and encompass the full scope of his life and career from his college days through his years of retirement from the Supreme Court. Following graduation from Whitman College, Douglas taught for a brief period at the high school in Yakima, Washington. After receiving a degree in law from Columbia University, he served on the faculties of Columbia and Yale law schools. At both law schools he was among a small group of professors who advocated an interdisciplinary rather than the traditional compartmentalized approach to the study of law. This innovative approach is reflected in his papers by two major projects. The first is the comprehensive study of the bankruptcy system and its effect on the social and economic structure of society begun in 1928 as part of a cooperative program between the Yale Law School and the Yale Institute of Human Relations. The study examined business failures in several cities and looked at court rules governing bankruptcy. In 1929 under the combined auspices of the Yale Law School, the Institute of Human Relations, and the United States Department of Commerce, these studies were broadened to investigate contributory causes and results of business failures. Most of the correspondence with his colleagues, staff, and Department of Commerce officials, the published reports of the department's projects, and several technical articles on bankruptcy and corporate finance written by Douglas are found in Part I of his papers. Bankruptcy forms, additional correspondence, working papers relating to the studies, law course syllabi, student papers, and other records dealing with his teaching responsibilities at Columbia and Yale universities and the Yakima high school are in the subject files of Part II.

The other project illustrating a nontraditional approach to the study of law is Douglas's support for the concept of a combined law and business course, a proposal espoused by a group of Harvard Business School professors after it had been rejected by the Harvard Law School. Seeing the integration of the study of law and business as a means of making the law more amenable to the needs of society, Douglas, working with George Eugene Bates of the Harvard Business School and others, designed a four-year course granting degrees in both law and business. Curriculum plans and the progress of the course are discussed in letters exchanged with George Eugene Bates, Charles Edward Clark, and others filed in the General Correspondence series and the Harvard University subject files in Part I and in the Yale-Harvard Business School file in the Subject File series of Part II of the collection.

Although Douglas engaged only briefly in private law practice, he served an apprenticeship with the firm of Cravath, De Gersdorff, Swaine and Wood and maintained his relationship with the firm during his professorial years at Columbia. Records from his service with this firm for the years 1922 to 1929 are found in both the Subject File series of Part II and in the General Correspondence series of Part I. The largest file deals with the affairs of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad Co.

In 1934, having gained a reputation in the field of finance and corporate matters, Douglas was named director of the Securities and Exchange Commission's Protective Committee Study charged with investigating types of abuses embraced by the various committees formed to protect investors during business reorganizations, foreclosures, or bankruptcies. The goal of the study was to develop legislation designed to facilitate and regulate bankruptcy reorganizations. Before the study was completed, however, Douglas was appointed to the commission, becoming chairman in 1937. Information concerning the work of the Protective Committee Study is found in the General Correspondence and the Subject File of Part I. Other commission files in Part I indicate that in addition to implementing the rules and regulations of the agency, Douglas was involved in revising bankruptcy legislation and in other issues concerning the economy, such as financing small businesses, reorganization of the railroads, and economic planning to meet the national emergency precipitated by events in Europe. Material in the Subject Fileof Part II from his tenure with the Securities and Exchange Commission includes desk calendars, records of press conferences, stenographic notebooks kept by his secretaries, and files relating to Douglas's role as an adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt. During his years at the commission he drafted speeches and prepared memoranda in response to queries from the President. Several of the speeches are in the Franklin D. Roosevelt subject file in Part II, but most of the memoranda are in the commission files in Part I. The chronological file in the correspondence series also contains items other than correspondence for his years with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

When Douglas retired from the Supreme Court in November 1975, he had served on the bench longer than any previous justice. His Court files are the most extensive in the collection. Records from 1938 to 1952 are in the Supreme Court File in Part I and those from 1953 to 1975 are in Part II. The files contain correspondence, memoranda prepared by the justices, memoranda prepared by law clerks, drafts and final opinions, docket books for each term, and printed matter. The case files are preceded by an office file consisting of applications for employment, memoranda exchanged between Douglas and his staff, scheduling and planning files, general information about the operation of the Court, and the law clerks file which contains various assignments given to the clerks and a file of correspondence Douglas exchanged with his former clerks over the years.

Case files are arranged by October term and sequentially within by docket number. Cases carried over to the next term were assigned new numbers for each court term until 1971 when all cases retained the court year prefix assigned when they were first entered on the court docket. For some court terms lists of conversion numbers are included at the front of the docket books. Assignment lists, argument lists, conference lists, docket books, and memoranda by the Court are generally grouped at the beginning of each October term. Douglas divided his case files into three major categories: argued cases, office memoranda (also called certiorari memoranda), and opinions. The argued case files include office or certiorari memoranda, memoranda and notes Douglas made at the weekly conferences recording the votes of the justices, and opinions prepared by other justices. The office memoranda file contains law clerks' summaries of issues in cases generally denied certiorari. The opinion files consist of cases in which Douglas wrote the opinion for the court or a dissenting or concurring opinion. The opinions, kept in a format that allows one to follow the stages in the drafting process, contain handwritten, typewritten, and various printings of opinions, circulations to the other justices, Douglas' conference notes, memoranda prepared by law clerks, including initialed opinions indicating that the clerks had reviewed or edited the various printings, occasional letters from attorneys or the public pertaining to the cases, and printed matter.

In terms of judicial philosophy, Douglas was regarded as a liberal. Some of his opinions and actions generated voluminous correspondence and press coverage. Douglas interpreted the First Amendment to oppose government action aimed at silencing or excluding those whose ideas differed from popular opinion. He was involved in major decisions guaranteeing the rights of the individual against federal and state governments and issues such as federal commercial law and bankruptcy and economic legislation. Analyses of his opinions are presented in the volumes, (1959) and (1974) by Vern Countryman, one of his former law clerks.

Throughout his life Douglas exhibited an interest in nature and a curiosity about the diversity of cultures among the peoples of the world. He combined these interests in his travels throughout the United States and visits to almost every foreign country. Some of the trips were vacations; others were to obtain information for articles he had agreed to write. He recorded his immediate impressions, explanatory notes, and observations in notebooks that became valuable resource tools when writing many of his books and articles. Wherever he traveled, he collected specimens of the local flora and was particularly interested in "subspeciation in the world of botany." He was fascinated with the Middle East, particularly Central Iran which he described as an area in which the botany of the East met that of the West. He submitted many of his specimens to botanists for scientific identification at state and national departments of agriculture and park and forest services. Descriptions of many of the plants native to localities are incorporated in his books and articles. He often illustrated his writings with photographs which he took during his travels. This aspect of his life is demonstrated in Part II of the papers by the immense articles and book file, the collection of correspondence and resource material in the Foreign Countries series, the extensive vacations and travel file in the Subject File, and by the array of photographs at the end of the collection.

The broad range of Douglas's interests is also exemplified by the proliferation of topics in the Subject File series of Part II. A comprehensive file on the environment includes material on conservation, the C & O Canal, wildlife, preservation of wilderness areas, and pollution of the air and water. He wrote numerous articles and several books on the status of wilderness areas and gave speeches on environmental issues, including an annual lecture on the "Wilderness Bill of Rights." He took part in demonstrations to have certain areas like the C & O Canal declared national parks or to prevent the destruction of scenic vistas. Other large files relate to the Fund for the Republic, the attempt to impeach Douglas, the Mass Education Movement, the Parvin Foundation, Columbia and Yale universities, and Whitman College.

Many of the topics in the Subject File also appear in the Speeches and Writings series, especially the environment and the rights of the individual. Douglas made it a practice not to accept speaking invitations from organizations likely to become litigants in cases before the Supreme Court. Consequently most of his engagements were at universities or with lecture forums. His speeches and writings prior to his appointment to the Court deal with financial matters. Among the recurrent themes in later speeches and writings are American policy towards Asia, including diplomatic recognition of the People's Republic of China, support of Israel, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court, and the rule of law among nations.

Evidence of the relations among members of the Douglas family can be found in the small segments of family papers in Part II and Part III. This series contains an extensive correspondence between Douglas and his sister, Martha, who often enclosed letters she had received from other members of the family. There is also correspondence with his brother, Arthur, his two children, his nieces, and his grandchildren discussing family celebrations, problems, finances, schooling for the grandchildren, and travel plans. This series also includes correspondence and papers relating to Douglas's marriages and a small group of letters concerning genealogy. Part III contains a letter from Douglas to his mother describing the last days and death of his father in 1904.

Douglas's extensive correspondence in Part I and Part II includes letters from prominent individuals, friends from college days, colleagues at law schools, jurists, American and foreign government officials, sports figures, acquaintances made during his travels abroad, and the general public. Douglas's correspondence with fellow justices of the Supreme Court contained in Part III relates to social affairs and ceremonial occasions or articles by the justices, except for several items in the Abe Fortas file concerning Fortas's nomination as chief justice in 1968 and his resignation from the Court in 1969. Among the more frequent correspondents are P. K. Bannerjee, George Eugene Bates, David T. Bazelon, Martha Douglas Bost, Jim D. Bowmer, Clark M. Clifford, Sidney M. Davis, Irving Dilliard, Arthur Douglas, Abe Fortas, Jerome Frank, Elon James Gilbert, Dagmar S. Hamilton, John J. Hooker, Edwin Palmer Hoyt, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Eliot Janeway, Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy, Robert Lantz, Francis Thomas Maloney, Alexander Howard Meneely, Richard Lewis Neuberger, Ram Rahul, Fred Rodell, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Carrol M. Shanks, J. Howard Shubert, Richard J. Smith, Helen M. Strauss, Phil Tippin, and Y. C. James Yen.