William O. Douglas - Retirement

Retirement

Since his 1970 impeachment hearings, Douglas had wanted to retire from the Court. He wrote to his friend and former student Abe Fortas: "My ideas are way out of line with current trends, and I see no particular point in staying around and being obnoxious."

On December 31, 1974, while on vacation in the Bahamas, Douglas suffered a debilitating stroke in the right hemisphere of his brain, which paralyzed his left leg and thus rendered him as a wheelchair user. Douglas, severely disabled, nonetheless insisted on continuing to participate in Supreme Court affairs despite his obvious incapacity. Seven of his fellow justices voted to postpone until the next term any argued case in which Douglas's vote might make a difference. At the urging of Fortas, Douglas finally retired on November 12, 1975, after 36 years of service. It was Douglas's old nemesis, then-President Gerald Ford, to whom he submitted his resignation, and who appointed his successor, John Paul Stevens.

The retirement of Douglas from the court introduced much confusion and difficulty, when he assumed that he could take senior status, and when he tried to continue serving. According to Woodward and Armstrong, Douglas refused to accept his own decision to retire, and he tried to continue participating in the Court's cases well into 1976, after Stevens had taken his seat. Douglas reacted with outrage when returning to his old chambers to discover that his clerks had been reassigned to Stevens, and attempted to file opinions in cases whose arguments he had heard before his retirement. Chief Justice Warren Burger ordered all Justices, clerks, and other staffers to refuse to assist Douglas in these efforts, and when Douglas attempted in March 1976 to hear arguments in a capital punishment case (Gregg v. Georgia), the nine sitting Justices signed a formal letter informing him that his retirement had ended his official duties on the Court. It was only then that Douglas stopped attempting to participate in Supreme Court business. His behavior has been attributed to the condition called anosognosia following his stroke, a neuropsychological presentation in which the affected person is unaware and unable to acknowledge disease in himself. It also often results in defects in reasoning, decision making, emotions, and feeling.