Former Supreme Court Justice Byron White dies
 |
|
||||||||||
White served on the court for 31 years before retiring in 1993. In the court’s history, only eight men served longer. His seat was filled by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
With White’s death, there are no living former Supreme Court justices. He had been ill much of the last two years and looked frail during his rare appearances at the Supreme Court. White had kept a court office since his retirement, but closed it last year and moved back to his native Colorado, a signal to many that his health was perilous.
White died this morning in Denver of complications from pneumonia, a statement from the Supreme Court said.
Appointed by President Kennedy in 1962, White soon became a dissenter from many of the court’s liberal rulings of the 1960s.
Later in his tenure, he was a consistent, if independent, member of the court’s increasingly conservative majority. A hard-liner on law-and-order issues, White often spoke for the court in decisions enhancing police authority.
He dissented from the court’s landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide, and thereafter steadfastly voted in favor of allowing states to regulate, or even outlaw, abortion.
White’s record on other divisive social issues was mixed.
He voted to give federal courts broad power to order racial desegregation of the nation’s public schools, and often sided with the court’s liberal wing in civil rights disputes. But he later opposed broad use of "affirmative action" to remedy past discrimination in employment.
White’s votes in free-speech and free-press cases were mixed, but generally he opposed expansive freedom-of-expression rights. He favored greater governmental accommodation of religion — in ways more liberal justices considered violations of the constitutionally required separation of church and state.
His opinion writing reflected his essential character: precise, methodical and impatient to finish the job.