Justice Byron White, 1917-2002.(Brief Article)

When former Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White died April 15 at age 84, he had been retired from the High Court for nine years. Because he was pigeonholed as a ?conservative,? White never received his proper due. In truth, White not only possessed a razor-sharp intellect, he was a complicated--and courageous--man.

Asked for their remembrances of this firm critic of Roe v. Wade, his former colleagues and law clerks were quick to praise White. ?He came as close as anyone I have known to meriting Matthew Arnold?s description of Sophocles,? Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said of his friend. ?He ?saw life steadily and saw it whole.??

Appointed to the Court by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, White is most familiar to pro-lifers for an oft-quoted remark from his eloquent dissent in Roe?s companion case, Doe v. Bolton, which he applied to Roe as well:

?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.?

An All-American football player and Rhodes Scholar, White was the personification of the ?ideal of intellectual vim married to physical vigor,? as Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe wrote. A prodigious worker, White wrote over 500 opinions in his 31 years on the bench.

A sharp and very shrewd questioner from the bench, he was always exceptionally well prepared. In a tribute to his friend and classmate, Senior U.S. District Judge Louis Oberdorfer recalled White?s ?sheer intellectual power, exquisitely good judgment, and perfectionist?s attention to detail.?

One news account recalled how, prior to his appointment to the Court, as a deputy to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, White personally faced down a governor who was in league with the Ku Klux Klan, a man who refused to guarantee that Black Freedom Riders would be protected.