The Honorable Jeffrey Sutton, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, joins the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown, senior judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, for a discussion on McKeown’s new book, Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas—Public Advocate and Conservation Champion, and the constitutional legacy of U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, one of the court’s longest serving justices. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
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This episode was produced by Tanaya Tauber, John Guerra, Lana Ulrich, Sam Desai, and Melody Rowell. It was engineered by the NCC’s AV team. Research was provided by Emily Campbell.
Participants
M. Margaret McKeown has served almost 25 years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an affiliated scholar at the Center for the American West at Stanford University, and jurist-in-residence at the University of San Diego School of Law. She is the author of Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas—Public Advocate and Conservation Champion.
Jeffrey Sutton has served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit since 2003 and was appointed chief judge in May 2021. Since 1993, Sutton has been an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University College of Law and Harvard Law School. He is co-editor of The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law and the author of several books, including 51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law and Who Decides?: States as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
Additional Resources
- M. Margaret McKeown, Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas—Public Advocate and Conservation Champion
- Seth Combs, The San Diego Union Tribune, "The environmental legacy of Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas"
- National Park Service, "Murie Ranch"
- Bruce Murphy, Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden
- Sierra Club v. Morton (1972)
- Christopher Stone, Southern California Law Review, "Should Trees Have Standing - Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects"
- National Constitution Center, The Founders' Library, Griswold v. Connecticut (1975)
- William O. Douglas, Farewell to Texas: A Vanishing Wilderness
- Jeffrey Sutton, Who Decides? States as Laboratories of Constitutional Experimentation
- National Constitution Center, Live at the National Constitution Center, "Why State Constitutions Matter"
- Harvard Law Review, "51 Imperfect Solutions: States and the Making of American Constitutional Law"
Excerpt from Interview
Judge Margaret McKeown: His view was that the Constitution's purpose was to get the government off the backs of little people. So you see that throughout his opinions, whether it's environmental opinions or others….He dissented almost in 500 opinions. And about 40 percent of those, or 45%, he was the lone dissenter. So that's a little unusual. And even when you stack him up to later dissenters, like Justice Scalia or Justice Stevens, he was really a king of dissents.
He was writing for the future, and it's had some resonance in international law in various countries in their constitutions, and even in America for various municipalities who have put that into their regulations. It hasn't really found a lot of traction in the courts, I would say. But again, it's found traction in common sense.
He talks about what we now know as rights of nature, and that is the valleys, the rivers, the mountains, those are the pieces of life that are gonna be damaged, so why shouldn't we give them a voice in the courts?
Douglas understood that in effect all politics is local. So when he was going down to Congress to talk with members of Congress, he was talking to them about the interests of their constituents and what would matter back home… So he was somebody that was always playing the state angle all the time.
Douglas was somebody with a larger vision. He certainly was not somebody who was telescoping his view just on one issue or one area of the country, but he was looking much broader.
I think the thing about Douglas is that he didn't didn't want to spend any more time on anything than he needed to. Brennan said he was one of the few geniuses he had ever met. And I think that's true from everything you read is that he was a genius. And he was a genius with a diffuse brain. He did his Supreme Court work, and then he was on the trail or he was climbing or he was traveling to Russia with Bobby Kennedy at the behest of President Kennedy. So he lived life to the fullest. There was not a minute left in his day. And yet when he was out in the wilderness or on the trail, that was his sanctuary. That was his getaway and his downtime.
Transcript
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