707305
Byron R. White
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Byron Raymond White, 1917–2002. Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court, 1962-1993; National Football League player, 1938, 1940-1941; member, College Football Hall of Fame. Extra fine photograph of Justice White, in his judicial robes, boldly signed on the mat Byron R. White.
President John F. Kennedy appointed White to the Supreme Court. In 1960, White, well known as a former college and professional football standout, chaired Kennedy's campaign in Colorado. When Kennedy entered the White House, he appointed White to be Deputy Attorney General, second in command in the Justice Department to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Two years later he elevated him to the Court.
White was a star football player for the Colorado Buffaloes. It was at the University of Colorado that he acquired the nickname “Whizzer,” which he came to detest. After graduation, White played the 1938 season for the NFL's Pittsburgh Pirates, which later became the Steelers. After a year hiatus to study as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, White returned to the NFL to play two seasons, 1940-1941, for the Detroit Lions. Overall, White played in 33 NFL games and led the league in rushing yardage in both 1938 and 1940. He was elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1954.
White chose law school over football after he returned from the Navy following World War II. He graduated from Yale Law School with honors in 1946 and served as a law clerk for Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson before returning to Denver, where he practiced law for 15 years. His appointment to the Supreme Court to succeed Justice Charles Evans Whittaker, who resigned for health reasons, made him the first law clerk to return to the Court as a Justice.
White’s judicial philosophy is not easily characterized. He took a narrow, fact-specific view of cases and was disinclined to make broad constitutional pronouncements. He was a fairly consistent conservative in criminal cases, and he dissented from the decision in Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 486 (1966), which requires that police advise criminal suspects of their legal rights before questioning, noting that aggressive police practices enhance the individual rights of law-abiding citizens. Otherwise his ideology had a measure of unpredictability. For example, in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), he voted to strike down a state statute prohibiting married couples from using contraceptives, impinging as it did on “the right . . . to be free of regulation of the intimacies of the marriage relationship." Yet he dissented from the landmark abortion rights ruling in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), arguing that the decision was “an exercise in raw judicial power" and criticizing it as “interposing a constitutional barrier to state efforts to protect human life,” but wrote the Court’s opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), which upheld Georgia’s sodomy law in the face of consensual homosexual activity.
This is a very nice portrait of Justice White. He has signed the mat boldly in blue pen. The autograph is extra fine.
Unframed. Please ask us about custom framing this piece.
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