Byron White
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| Byron Raymond White | |
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| In office April 16, 1962 – June 28, 1993 |
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| Nominated by | John F. Kennedy |
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| Preceded by | Charles Evans Whittaker |
| Succeeded by | Ruth Bader Ginsburg |
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| Born | June 8, 1917 Fort Collins, Colorado |
| Died | April 15, 2002 (aged 84) Denver, Colorado |
Byron Raymond White (June 8, 1917 – April 15, 2002) won fame both as a football running back and as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Appointed to the court by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, he served until his retirement in 1993. He was married to Marion Lloyd Stearns in 1946 and the father of two children, Charles (Barney) Byron White and Nancy Pitkin White.
He was born in Fort Collins, Colorado, and died in Denver at the age of 84 from complications of pneumonia.
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[edit] Education
White attended the University of Colorado, where he was a star football player and earned a degree in 1938. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford (Hertford College). After World War II, he attended Yale Law School, graduating with honors in 1946. During his years at Yale Law, he served as Chairman of the Conservative Party of the Yale Political Union, preceded by Homer Daniels Babbidge and succeeded by Johnston Redmond Livingston.[1]
[edit] Football
| Byron White | |
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| Position(s): Half back |
Jersey #(s): 24 |
| Born: June 8, 1917 | |
| Died: April 15, 2002 (aged 84) | |
| Career Information | |
| Year(s): 1938–1941 | |
| NFL Draft: 1938 / Round: 1 / Pick: 4 | |
| College: Colorado | |
| Professional Teams | |
| Career Stats | |
| Rushing Yards | 1,321 |
| Average | 3.4 |
| Rushing TDs | 11 |
| Stats at NFL.com | |
| Career Highlights and Awards | |
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| College Football Hall of Fame | |
White was a star football player for the Colorado Buffaloes, where he acquired the nickname "Whizzer," which he later came to despise. After graduation he signed with the NFL's Pittsburgh Pirates (now Steelers), playing there during the 1938 season. He took 1939 off to study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, but returned to play for the Detroit Lions from 1940-41. In three NFL seasons, he played in 33 games. He led the league in rushing yards in 1938 and 1940. His career was cut short when he entered the United States Navy during World War II; after the war, he elected to attend law school rather than returning to football. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954.[1]
[edit] Military service
During World War II, White served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy stationed in the Pacific Theatre. He wrote the intelligence report on the sinking of future President John F. Kennedy's PT-109.[1]
[edit] Legal career
After serving as a law clerk to Chief Justice Fred Vinson, White returned to Denver.
White practiced in Denver for roughly fifteen years with the law firm now known as Davis Graham & Stubbs. This was a time in which the Denver business community flourished, and White rendered legal service to that flourishing community. White was for the most part a transactional attorney. He drafted contracts and advised insolvent companies, and he also argued the occasional case in court.[1]
During the United States presidential election, 1960, White put his football celebrity to use as chair of John F. Kennedy's campaign in Colorado. During the Kennedy administration, White served as United States Deputy Attorney General, the number two man in the Justice Department, under Robert F. Kennedy. Acquiring renown within the Kennedy Administration for his humble manner and sharp mind, he was appointed by Kennedy in 1962 to succeed Justice Charles Evans Whittaker, who retired for disability.
[edit] Supreme Court
During his service on the high court, White wrote 994 opinions. His votes and opinions on the bench reflect an ideology that has been notoriously difficult for popular journalists and legal scholars alike to pin down. White often took a narrow, fact-specific view of cases before the Court and generally refused to make broad pronouncements on constitutional doctrine. In the tradition of the New Deal, White frequently supported a broad view of governmental powers (see New York v. United States 488 U.S. 1041 (1992) (White, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part)). He consistently voted against creating constitutional restrictions on the police, dissenting in the landmark 1966 case of Miranda v. Arizona; in his dissent in that case he noted that aggressive police practices enhance the individual rights of law-abiding citizens. His jurisprudence has sometimes been praised for adhering to the doctrine of judicial restraint. (See Dennis Hutchinson, "Two Cheers for Judicial Restraint: Justice White and the Role of the Supreme Court," 74 U. Colo. L. Rev. 1409 (2003)).
[edit] Substantive due process doctrine
Frequently a critic of the doctrine of "substantive due process," which involves the judiciary reading substantive content into the term "liberty" in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment, White dissented in the controversial 1973 case of Roe v. Wade. But White voted to strike down a state ban on contraceptives in the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut, although he did not join the majority opinion, which famously asserted a "right of privacy" on the basis of the "penumbras" of the Bill of Rights. White and Rehnquist were the only dissenters from the Court's decision in Roe, though White's dissent used stronger language, suggesting that Roe was "an exercise in raw judicial power" and criticizing the decision for "interposing a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human life." White, who usually adhered firmly to the doctrine of stare decisis, remained a critic of Roe throughout his term on the bench. (See Thornburg v. American Coll. of Obst. & Gyn. 476 U.S. 747 (1986) (White, J., dissenting))
White explained his general views on the validity of substantive due process at length in his dissent in Moore v. City of East Cleveland:
- The Judiciary, including this Court, is the most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or even the design of the Constitution. Realizing that the present construction of the Due Process Clause represents a major judicial gloss on its terms, as well as on the anticipation of the Framers, and that much of the underpinning for the broad, substantive application of the Clause disappeared in the conflict between the Executive and the Judiciary in the 1930's and 1940's, the Court should be extremely reluctant to breathe still further substantive content into the Due Process clause so as to strike down legislation adopted by a State or city to promote its welfare. Whenever the Judiciary does so, it unavoidably pre-empts for itself another part of the governance of the country without express constitutional authority.
White parted company with Rehnquist in strongly supporting the Supreme Court decisions striking down laws that discriminated on the basis of sex, agreeing with Justice William J. Brennan in 1973's Frontiero v. Richardson that laws discriminating on the basis of sex should be subject to strict scrutiny. However, only four justices signed on to Brennan's opinion in Frontiero; in later cases gender discrimination cases would be subjected to intermediate scrutiny (see Craig v. Boren).
White wrote the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which upheld Georgia's anti-sodomy law against a substantive due process attack. White's opinion in Bowers was typical of White's fact-specific, deferential style of deciding cases: White's opinion treated the issue in that case as presenting only the question of whether homosexuals had a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity, even though the statute in Bowers potentially applied to heterosexual sodomy (see Bowers, 478 U.S. 186, 188, n. 1). After White's retirement, Bowers was overruled by the 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas.
[edit] Death penalty
White took a middle course on the issue of the death penalty: he was one of five justices who voted in Furman v. Georgia (1972) to strike down several state capital punishment statutes, voicing concern over the arbitrariness with which the death penalty was administered. The Furman decision ended capital punishment in the U.S. until 1977, when Gary Gilmore, who decided not to appeal his death sentence, was killed by firing squad. White, however, was not against the death penalty in all forms: he voted to uphold the death penalty statutes at issue in Gregg v. Georgia (1976), even the mandatory death penalty schemes struck down by the Court.
White accepted the position that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution required that all punishments be "proportional" to the crime (see Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U.S. 957 (1991) (White, J., dissenting)); thus, he wrote the opinion in Coker v. Georgia (1977), which invalidated the death penalty for rape of a 16-year old married woman.
White however thought that imposing the death penalty on minors was constitutional, as he was one of the three dissenters in Thompson v. Oklahoma, a case that declared that the death penalty as applied to offenders below 16 years old was unconstitutional.
[edit] Abortion
Byron White was a dissenter in the Roe v. Wade decision castigating the majority for holding that the U.S. Constitution "values the convenience, whim or caprice of the putative mother more than the life or potential life of the fetus."
[edit] Civil rights
White consistently supported the Court's post-Brown attempts to fully desegregate public schools, even through the controversial line of forced busing cases. (See Milliken v. Bradley (White, J., dissenting)). He voted to uphold affirmative action remedies to racial inequality in an education setting in the famous Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case of 1978. Though White voted to uphold federal affirmative action programs in cases such as Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC, 497 U.S. 547 (1990) (later overruled by Adarand Constructors v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200 (1995)), White voted to strike down an affirmative action plan regarding state contracts in Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989).
White dissented in Runyon v. McCrary (1976), which held that federal law prohibited private schools from discriminating on the basis of race. White argued that the legislative history of Title 42 U.S.C. § 1981 (popularly known as the "Ku Klux Klan Act") indicated that the Act was not designed to prohibit private racial discrimination, but only state-sponsored racial discrimination (as had been held in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883). White was concerned about the potential far-reaching impact of holding private racial discrimination illegal, which if taken to its logical conclusion might ban many varied forms of voluntary self-segregation, including social and advocacy groups that limited their membership to blacks. See Runyon, 427 U.S. 160, 212 (White, J., dissenting) ("Whether such conduct should be condoned or not, whites and blacks will undoubtedly choose to form a variety of associational relationships pursuant to contracts which exclude members of the other race. Social clubs, black and white, and associations designed to further the interests of blacks or whites are but two examples"). Runyon was essentially overruled by 1989's Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, which itself was overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1991.
[edit] Court operations and retirement
White frequently urged that the Supreme Court should consider cases when federal appeals courts were in conflict on issues of federal law, believing that a primary role of the Supreme Court was to resolve such conflicts. Thus, White voted to grant certiorari more often than many of his colleagues, and he wrote numerous opinions dissenting from denials of certiorari. After White (along with fellow Justice Harry Blackmun, who also took a liberal line in voting to grant certiorari) retired, the number of cases heard each session of the Court declined steeply. See David M. O'Brien, The Rehnquist Court s Shrinking Plenary Docket, 81 Judicature 58-65 (Sept./Oct. 1997).
White disliked the politics of Supreme Court appointments. (See Hutchinson, Whizzer White). He retired in 1993, during Bill Clinton's presidency; Clinton appointed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to succeed him. After retiring from the Supreme Court, White occasionally sat with lower federal courts. He maintained chambers in the federal courthouse in Denver until shortly before his death. He also served for the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals,[2]
By the time of his death in 2002, White was the last living Warren Court Justice. From his death until the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor, there were no living former Justices.
[edit] Honors
The NFL Players Association gives the Byron "Whizzer" White award to one NFL player each year for his charity work. Michael McCrary, who was involved in Runyon v. McCrary, grew up to be a professional football player and won the Byron "Whizzer" White award in 2001.
The federal courthouse in Denver that houses the Tenth Circuit is named after Justice White.
Justice White was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003 by President George W. Bush.
White was inducted into the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Hall of Fame on July 14, 2007.[3]
[edit] References
| Legal offices | ||
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| Preceded by Charles Evans Whittaker |
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States April 16, 1962 – June 28, 1993 |
Succeeded by Ruth Bader Ginsburg |
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