William O. Douglas and Yakima

The federal courthouse in Yakima bears the name of William O. Douglas, one of the most consequential justices in Supreme Court history, and a man who grew up in this valley. Douglas was born in Minnesota but moved to Yakima as a child after his father died, and he spent his formative years here in straitened circumstances.

He later wrote that hiking the Cascade foothills above Yakima as a teenager, to strengthen legs weakened by what he believed was childhood polio, gave him a lifelong love of wilderness. Douglas served on the Supreme Court from nineteen thirty-nine to nineteen seventy-five, a tenure of thirty-six years, the longest in the Court's history. He was a fierce civil libertarian and an early advocate for environmental rights, arguing in a nineteen seventy-two dissent that natural objects like rivers and trees should have standing to sue in court.

The Cascades he knew as a Yakima boy appear throughout his writings.