Daily Inspiration Quote by William O. Douglas

Douglas lands the line like a judge with a comedian’s timing: the Fourteenth Amendment, cornerstone of American equality, is also a bottle of snake oil passed around the courtroom for whatever a litigant wants to cure. “Patent medicine” isn’t just a dig at legal opportunism; it’s a cultural reference to a famously unregulated industry that sold miracle tonics with vague claims and inconsistent ingredients. The insult does double duty. It mocks the lawyers who treat constitutional language as a universal solvent, and it hints that the Court itself sometimes plays pharmacist, handing out doctrinal doses on vibe and appetite rather than on a stable recipe.

The specific intent is a warning about promiscuous constitutional reasoning. The Fourteenth’s capacious phrases - “due process,” “equal protection” - invite grandeur and mischief in the same breath. Douglas, a justice associated with expansive civil liberties, isn’t rejecting the Amendment’s power so much as calling out the way it becomes a vehicle for wildly different agendas: racial justice, incorporation of the Bill of Rights, economic liberty, privacy, segregationists’ “states’ rights” reframed as “liberty.” If everything can be poured into the Fourteenth, then the Amendment risks becoming less a constraint on power than a rhetorical permission slip.

Context matters: by the mid-20th century, the Fourteenth had become the Court’s main pipeline for applying federal rights against the states and for remaking social policy. Douglas’s cynicism reflects a bench aware that constitutional interpretation is never purely clinical. The joke stings because it’s true: the Amendment’s greatness is inseparable from its susceptibility to being marketed.