Education Quote by William O. Douglas

A jab at judicial temptation disguised as humility, William O. Douglas’s line draws a bright line between judging and governing. “We do not sit as a superlegislature” is less a description than a warning shot: courts aren’t meant to be robed policy councils roaming the statute books for ideas they dislike. The phrase “to weigh the wisdom” is doing the real work. Douglas isn’t denying that legislation can be foolish, punitive, or politically opportunistic; he’s insisting that “wisdom” isn’t the constitutional test. Legitimacy is.

The subtext is an internal argument within the judiciary about restraint and power. In the background sits the long American fight over “judicial activism,” from Lochner-era courts striking down labor laws on laissez-faire instincts to later battles over the New Deal and civil rights. Douglas, a New Deal liberal and a fierce defender of civil liberties, knew the irony: he was no minimalist when constitutional rights were on the line. That makes the sentence strategically narrow. It doesn’t say courts should be timid; it says courts should be principled about the source of their interventions. If a law violates the Constitution, strike it. If it’s merely dumb, voters and legislators own that problem.

Rhetorically, “superlegislature” is a charged caricature: an imagined court that substitutes taste for law, elitism for text, preference for principle. Douglas deploys that specter to preserve the Court’s credibility while quietly asserting its proper role: not to perfect democracy, but to police its boundaries.