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 John F. Kennedy in 1962, he served until his retirement in 1993.

He was born in Fort Collins, Colorado and died in Denver at the age of 84 from complications of pneumonia.

In the mid-1930s, 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 first in his class 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 [1] and succeeded by Johnston Redmond Livingston.

White was a star football player for the University of Colorado [[Colorado Buffaloes|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, 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

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.

After serving as a law clerk to Chief Justice Frederick M. Vinson, White returned to Denver, where he practiced law for a number of years. During the 1960 presidential campaign, White put his football celebrity to use as chair of John F. Kennedy's campaign in Colorado. During the Kennedy administration, White served as 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 had taken ill.

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, in the tradition of the New Deal, frequently supported a broad view of governmental powers. He consistently voted against creating constitutional restrictions on the police, dissenting in the landmark 1966 case of Miranda v. Arizona.

Frequently a critic of the doctrine of "substantive due process," White dissented in the controversial 1973 case of Roe v. Wade which declared abortion a constitutional right. 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 v. Wade, 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.

However, White parted company with Rehnquist in strongly supporting the Supreme Court decisions striking down laws that discriminated on the basis of gender, agreeing with Justice William J. Brennan in 1973's Frontiero v. Richardson that laws discriminating on the basis of gender should be subject to strict scrutiny.

White wrote the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which upheld Georgia's anti-sodomy law against a substantive due process attack, that was later overruled by Lawrence v. Texas (2003).

White also 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 effectively ended capital punishment in the U.S. for the remainder of the 1970s. 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; 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 consistently supported the Court's post-Brown attempts to fully desegregate public schools, even through the controversial line of forced busing cases. 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, Inc. v. Pena, 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 the Runyon v. McCrary case in 1976, which held that federal law prohibited private schools from discriminating on the basis of race, arguing 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. Runyon was essentially overruled by 1989's Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, which itself was overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

The 1991 Act also overruled several White opinions making it more difficult for employees to succeed in disparate impact claims under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, where employees would sue on the basis of statistics indicating the lack of minorities in high-ranking positions. Critics claimed that such interpretations essentially forced companies to adopt affirmative action plans.

White insisted that the Supreme Court hear appeals whenever federal courts were ostensibly in conflict on some matter of federal law. Thus, White was extremely liberal in voting to grant certiorari to allow the Court to hear cases, and he wrote numerous dissents from denial of certiorari. When 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.

White disliked the politics of Supreme Court appointments. At the end of his service on the Supreme Court, he was the only Democrat on the bench as well as the last of the Warren Court Justices. While he agreed with conservatives on many judicial issues, he remained loyal to the Democratic Party and wanted a Democrat to name his successor. Therefore, he retired in 1993, during Bill Clinton's presidency; Clinton would appoint Ruth Bader Ginsburg to succeed him.

By the time of his death in 2002, White was the last living Warren Court Justice.

• "While the collateral consequences of drugs such as cocaine are indisputably severe, they are not unlike those which flow from the misuse of other, legal, substances." -- Justice Byron R. White
• "As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court." Justice Byron R. White dissenting from the decisions of the US Supreme Court in Doe v. Bolton and Roe v. Wade.

The NFL Players Association gives the Byron "Whizzer" White award to one NFL player each year for his charity work.

White wrote a strong dissent in Runyon v. McCrary in 1976, saying that the court should have ruled against the parents of Michael McCrary, who attempted to enroll McCrary in a whites-only private school. McCrary grew up to be a professional football player and won the Byron "Whizzer" White award in 2001.

A United States courthouse in Denver is named after Byron White.

Popular evangelist and writer of the Left Behind books, Dr. Tim LaHaye, has called Byron White the only true conservative to serve on the Supreme Court in his lifetime.

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