Stephen F. Williams, U.S. Appeals Court Judge, Dies at 83

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Stephen F. Williams, an erudite lapsed liberal whose opinions reverberated from the bench of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia for three decades, died on Aug. 7 in a Washington hospital. He was 83.

The cause was complications of the coronavirus, his daughter, Susan Ellis said.

Judge Williams was a Democratic environmentalist who voted for George S. McGovern for president in 1972 and had joined in a vigil against the Vietnam War, but who evolved later in the decade into a born-again conservative.

“‘When you’re young,’” Ms. Ellis quoted her father as saying, “‘it’s foolish to be conservative, and when you’re older, it’s foolish to be a liberal.’”