Byron Raymond White in the United States
White Byron Raymond
Introduction to Byron Raymond White
Byron Raymond White (1917-2002), American jurist, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1962 to 1993. White was born in Fort Collins, Colorado, on June 8, 1917, and grew up in the tiny town of Wellington. He earned the nickname “Whizzer” as a star running back on the University of Colorado football team. After graduating as class valedictorian in 1938, White played professional football for the Pittsburgh Steelers, leading the National Football League in rushing in his first year. In 1939 he went to the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship before entering Yale Law School. He played football for the Detroit Lions while attending law school. In 1942 his studies were interrupted by service in the U.S. Navy as a naval intelligence officer during World War II. After working as a law clerk (1946-1947) to U.S. chief justice Frederick Moore Vinson, White entered private practice in Denver, Colorado. He took an active part in the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, a longtime friend. He was appointed deputy attorney general of the United States by President Kennedy in 1961 and named to the Supreme Court in 1962.
On the Court, White earned the reputation of a pragmatist. He was a hardliner in the criminal law field, writing an outspoken dissent to the Miranda v. Arizona decision in 1966 that ruled that police must advise criminal suspects of certain legal rights before interrogation. White wrote that the Miranda ruling “will return a killer, a rapist or other criminal to the streets and to the environment which produced him, to repeat his crime whenever it pleases him.” But while impatient with constitutional protections for suspects, he was uncomfortable with laws that worked to the advantage of segregationists. Writing for the Court majority in Reitman v. Mulkey in 1967, White threw out a California housing regulation that effectively authorized racial discrimination by giving private property owners total discretion over whom they sold, leased, or rented their property to. In 1971 in Palmer v. Thompson he wrote a vigorous dissent to the Court’s ruling that Jackson, Mississippi, could close its swimming pools rather than desegregate them.
In 1978 White dissented from the decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke that a university could not reserve places for disadvantaged members of minority groups. In 1986 in Bowers v. Hardwick, he wrote the majority opinion rejecting a challenge to a Georgia law forbidding sodomy between consenting adults in private, denying that the constitutional right to privacy protects homosexuals. White retired from the court in 1993.” (1)
Resources
Notes and References
- Information about Byron Raymond White in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia