Born: Thursday, April 27th, 1922
Religion: Congregational
Education: University of Idaho, B.A. (1948)
Gonzaga University Law School, LL.B. (1950)
Career: Deputy Prosecutor (1951-1954)
Superior Court (1958-1979)
Served: Monday, January 8th, 1979 to Monday, January 14th, 1985
Chief Justice: Monday, January 10th, 1983 to Monday, January 14th, 1985
Political Party: Democrat
On May 14, 1984, after only six years, Washington State Supreme Court Justice William H. Williams announced he would retire at the end of his term. Previously, Williams hinted he would run for a second term. Some thought he would serve a couple of years, resign, and allow Democratic Governor Booth Gardner to fill his vacancy. But Williams believed election to be a contract with voters to complete a term. The chief justice’s tenure of six years on the Washington State Supreme Court and twenty-one on the Spokane County Superior Court made him the state’s senior judge. In announcing his retirement Williams explained, “After this many years in public service, my wife, Ruth, and I would like to have some time of our own to do those things we’ve always wanted to do.”William Henry Williams spent his earliest years on a family farm located between Fairfield, Washington, and Plummer, Idaho. The uncertain nature of farming forced his father to seek more secure employment, and he began working for the Washington Water Power Company during the off-season while farming during the summer. In 1926, when William was four years old, his father moved the family to Opportunity, Washington, nine miles east of Spokane, to work full time as an electrician for the power company. He remained there until his retirement in 1953. Except for a brief period in a real estate office, the justice’s mother never worked outside the home.
In 1933 the Williams family moved to Spokane’s south hill. Judge Williams attended public schools – first Roosevelt Elementary and then Lewis and Clark High School. In his senior year Bill started boxing at the Young Men’s Christian Association. His prowess gave the young man an opportunity for a college education at the University of Idaho, one of the nation’s boxing powerhouses. The boxing coach arranged part-time employment for Williams, and his investment paid off when Williams won the Pacific Coast intercollegiate boxing championship in only his second year of collegiate competition.
The future judge entered an advanced Reserved Officers Training Corps program at the university, but discomforting thoughts of commanding an infantry unit prompted him, on the day before he was to be sworn in as an army officer, to travel to Fairchild Air Force Base, near Spokane, and enlist in the U. S. Army Air Corps. Within a couple of months he entered flight training school. Later, the air corps assigned Williams to the Eighth Air Force in England as a B-24 bomber pilot and he flew twenty-six combat missions.
In 1946 Williams returned to the University of Idaho to resume work on his B.A. degree in political science. Athletics again drew his attention. After guiding his intramural football team to victory, Williams joined the university’s varsity squad and played quarterback in the last four games of the 1946 season. The next year, while completing his first year of law school, he started at quarterback for the university’s team. Although he had never lived in the Spokane suburb, his passing prowess earned him the title of “The Hillyard Rifle.” Bill played on the West squad of the East-West Shrine football game on New Year’s day 1948.
For William H. Williams, the practice of law had been a life-long goal. Two men-his father and his father’s high school Latin teacher, Charles Greenoughhad planted the seeds of this ambition. Williams therefore transferred to Spokane’s Gonzaga Law School to complete his legal training. His grades were only average, but he completed the four-year program in only two-and-a-half years.
After graduation, Jack Dean, a 1950 graduate of Gonzaga Law School and later Williams’s law partner, drew Williams into Democratic partisan politics. Dean would later serve as Williams’s campaign manager in races for the superior court and the state supreme court. But in 1952, Jack Dean managed the Spokane area election bid of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Hugh Mitchell and asked Williams to help. Republican Arthur Langlie trounced Mitchell, but the Dean-Williams “machine” gained valuable experience. Williams then managed the successful political campaign of a friend for sheriff. Albert Rosellini approached Williams and Dean to manage his Spokane gubernatorial effort in 1956. The campaign brought the future judge and the new governor together in a lasting friendship. In recognition of his partisan efforts, Democrats elected Williams a state committeeman from Spokane County in 1957.
The law, however, prevailed over partisan politics. Williams worked for Spokane County Prosecutor Hugh Evans and soon developed a reputation as a talented trial lawyer. Shortly after joining the prosecutor’s office, Williams felt financially secure enough to begin family life. He married in November 1951 and his first daughter was born in 1953. The marriage ended in divorce in 1954.
Williams’s second marriage to Ruth, a Spokane nurse, proved longer-lived. Six months after their marriage, she retired from nursing and focused her energies on homemaking and raising their family. The couple had three daughters and two sons.
Williams and Dean formed a general practice partnership when Williams left the prosecutor’s office. As Dean later described it, “We starved together with dignity.” Williams handled most of the trial work.
In 1958, Judge Carl Quackenbush retired from the Spokane County Superior Court. In part because Williams had managed the governor’s Spokane campaign, and because the Spokane Bar Association placed Williams first on its list of recommended attorneys, Rosellini selected him to the superior court vacancy.
Judge Williams served on the superior court bench for twenty one years, becoming one of the most respected members of the state’s trial bench. His colleagues honored him when they elected him to the board of trustees of the Washington State Judges Association and later selected him as its president. He was a no-nonsense, yet compassionate jurist. Because of his straightforward and firm sentencing practices, the judge became known around the inmate population of the state prison as “Walla Walla Williams.”
He was particularly proud of two practices he introduced while serving as senior judge on the trial bench. The first was a pro tempore judge system; the second, a weekly brown-bag lunch where he and his colleagues discussed administrative problems and shared thoughts on matters of mutual concern. Gradually, a strong group identity emerged out of what previously had been six separate judicial operations. This latter innovation typified Williams’s practice of informally consulting with colleagues and attempting to bring together a number of independently minded judges toward a common goal.
In 1978 Williams’s old friend from the Washington Supreme Court, Orris L. Hamilton, another east-sider, urged Williams to consider running for the supreme court seat he would soon relinquish. Williams, honored by Hamilton’s suggestion, liked life as it was and politely but emphatically turned down his friend’s offer. Justice Hamilton phoned again in two weeks, and persuaded Williams to reconsider. This time Williams admitted he was tempted, but remained noncommittal. The odds that someone from the east side could win an election to the supreme court seemed very low. But Williams thought his two major opponents-Keith Callow and Francis Holman-both from Seattle, would split the western vote in the September primary. With enough Democratic and labor support Williams could be a credible candidate in November. Williams outpolled his three opponents in the primary. In the general election he faced his old friend and fellow superior court jurist, Holman. He won a narrow election victory, 386,244 votes to Holman’s 365,721.
While serving on the trial bench, most people perceived Walla Walla Williams as being firmly on the side of law enforcement. On the supreme court, Williams appeared to abandon his previous hard line views, especially in search and seizure cases. He believed “the Bill of Rights was written to protect people against their government; the price of liberty is that some get away.” Justice Williams warned that “law enforcement agencies must also follow the law; if you do not follow the law, be prepared to suffer the consequences.” However, once convicted by scrupulously gathered evidence, guilty parties could expect little sympathy from the judge.
One observer saw Williams as “philosophically in the middle” of supreme court jurists. Williams’s close friend and colleague, Justice Hugh Rosellini, also saw him as a moderating influence on the court. As a superior court judge, Williams gained credit for strengthening the cohesiveness of that bench. But each member of the supreme court was working to capacity, and there was no time for leisurely reconciliation of issues. Williams became particularly bothered by the vast amount of reading required. During court terms, a table in his chambers supported a mountain of briefs, memos, and records waiting to be read carefully and thoughtfully. The chief justice readily admitted he was not the speed reader that some of his colleagues were, but he managed to complete his work.
Williams accepted dissent as a critical part of the supreme court’s decisional process. To him, the most important function of drafting dissenting opinions was to win over a majority. In his six years on the court he wrote thirty-one dissents, seventeen of which proved compelling enough to become majority opinions. These figures point to the power of dissent, and the persuasiveness of Williams.
After four years as an associate justice, Williams inherited the responsibilities of chief justice in 1983. Although he was not required to write opinions, Chief Justice Williams chose to write a few each term, including an occasional dissent.
In his six years on the high bench, Williams became instrumental in moving the court slightly toward the liberal side of the political spectrum. He most often found himself aligned with moderate-to-liberal justices. He often cast the swing vote in close cases, making him a powerful court member. Each time Williams wrote an opinion, he had a high probability of retaining or getting a majority.
In a February 1984 interview, Chief Justice Williams admitted that
being a public servant is not easy. It’s frustrating to me sometimes. There’s too high an expectation of what we can do. Changing society is not our role constitutionally. At the same time, we come out with things that we are required constitutionally to do that dissatisfy people.
Bill Williams felt his greatest accomplishment on the high court was to help revitalize the state constitution by basing decisions on that fundamental law rather than the United States Constitution. In retirement, Williams sat as pro tem judge at all levels of the Washington court system and did occasional work for federal courts in Spokane. He continued to hold a desk in Jack Dean’s law office.
Selected References
See the Williams oral history interview, supreme court collection, Washington State Archives and the Jack Dean oral history interview, same collection. Also see Spokane Spokesman-Review, 20 Jy. 1978, 29 Oct. 1978, and 26 Feb. 1984; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, II Feb. 1979 and 15 May 1984; Moscow Palouse Empire News, 27 Nov. 1981; and Yakima Herald-Republic, 23 Je. 1983.
The preceding biography is from Charles Sheldon's The Washington High Bench: A Biographical History of the State Supreme Court, 1889-1991, © 1992 by the Board of Regents of Washington State University. Reprinted here with permission and licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License by The Temple of Justice Project.
