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Judge Posner on Justice Douglas

Judge Posner (7th Cir.) has an article reviewing a book on the life and times of Justice Douglas.

Sounds like a scorching book. Although the author apparently rather liked Douglas, he wound up concluding that almost all of Douglas' supposed personal life was fabricated ... down to his Arlington Nat'l Cemetery tombstone, which says he was a veteran of WWI, when he never enlisted (another text, apparently based on an interview, says he didn't let polio stop him from enlisting. He never had polio, either).

One of my classmates clerked for Douglas toward the end of his time on the bench (he was massively disabled by a stroke, didn't want to resign lest Nixon appoint his successor, and wound up being wheeled to the bench in Pampers). Even before then, my classmate suggested that he was not easy to work with, crotchety, ungrateful, impatient, and quite an egotist.

(Via Volokh Conspiracy)

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