Byron Raymond "Whizzer" White (June 8, 1917 – April 15, 2002) was an American lawyer, jurist, and professional football player who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1962 until 1993.

Minor work as the Colorado state chair of John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign led to him being unexpectedly tapped in 1961 for a position as U.S. Deputy Attorney General.

White espoused a pragmatic and non-doctrinaire judicial approach which strengthened the powers of the federal government, advocated for the desegregation of public schools, and upheld the use of affirmative action.

Though expected to be a reliably liberal justice, he was by contrast a vociferous opponent of substantive due process, penning dissents in both Miranda v. Arizona and Roe v. Wade.

In his junior year, he and his brother rented out land and spent long hours in the fields, during which time White adopted a nearly lifelong habit of smoking.

[5] Whereas Sam was a gregarious and socially active child, White was described as a taciturn boy who "was very quiet, measuring every single word, showing no emotion, and revealing nothing.

He studied diligently in order to attain a scholarship to attend college, later describing his philosophy in Wellington as "do your work and don't be late for dinner.

[10] However, he would become a star athlete after playing as an All-American halfback for the Colorado Buffaloes football team,[11] winning a series of victories to become among the most acclaimed players in the country.

[14] He served as student body president his senior year, switched his major to the humanities, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and valedictorian from the University of Colorado in 1938 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics.

[21] After months of study, White also attained the Rhodes Scholarship, deferring it for a year to play professional football before attending Hertford College.

"[29][30][31] Upon moving into Hertford College with the intent of studying law, he befriended the future mathematician George Piranian and was assigned with C. H. S. Fifoot as a tutor.

[35] Following the end of a term, White spent a summer vacation touring France and Germany, settling down in Munich in order to study the German language and Roman law.

He unexpectedly reunited with John F. Kennedy, who was on his own tour of Europe with Torbert Macdonald, and on one occasion the three were heckled by a mob who recognized their English license plates.

[42] Future justice Potter Stewart, one year ahead of him at the university, remembered White as "a serious-minded, scholarly, and rather taciturn (except when he found himself engaged in lively colloquy with J. W. Moore in his class on Procedure), and extremely likable young man with steel-rimmed eyeglasses.

[44] White would turn down an offer to join the editorship of the Yale Law Journal,[45] instead taking a leave of absence to promptly return to professional football as a member of the Detroit Lions.

[55] At the end of 1941 Lions season, White returned to Yale to await a call to serve in the U.S. Navy after the Attack on Pearl Harbor; in May 1942, he was assigned to naval intelligence and spent weeks training at Dartmouth College and in New York City.

He was fierce in questioning attorneys in court,[11] and 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.

[68] Frequently a critic of the doctrine of "substantive due process", which involves the judiciary reading substantive content into the term "liberty" in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment, White's first published opinion as a Supreme Court Justice was a joint dissent with Justice Clark in Robinson v. California (1962), foreshadowing his career-long distaste for the doctrine.

In Robinson, he criticized the remainder of the Court's unprecedented expansion of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment" to strike down a California law providing for civil commitment of drug addicts.

White, who usually adhered firmly to the doctrine of stare decisis, remained a critic of Roe throughout his term on the bench and frequently voted to uphold laws restricting abortion, including in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992.

Only three justices joined Brennan's plurality opinion in Frontiero; later gender discrimination cases would be subjected to intermediate scrutiny (see Craig v. Boren).

In Rostker v. Goldberg, White joined Brennan and Marshall in dissent arguing that male-only Selective Service registration was unconstitutional.

White accepted the position that the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution required that all punishments be "proportional" to the crime;[73] thus, in Coker v. Georgia (1977), he wrote the opinion that invalidated the death penalty for rape of a 16-year-old married girl.

"[74] White consistently supported the Court's post-Brown v. Board of Education attempts to fully desegregate public schools, even through the controversial line of forced busing cases.

[75] 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.

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:[76] "Whether such conduct should be condoned or not, whites and blacks will undoubtedly choose to form a variety of associational relationships pursuant to contracts which exclude members of the other race.

"[11] On the Burger Court, the chief justice often assigned important criminal procedure and individual rights opinions to White because of his frequently conservative views on these questions.

After White (along with fellow Justice Harry Blackmun, who also often voted for liberal grants of certiorari) retired, the number of cases heard each session of the Court declined steeply.

[77] White disliked the politics of Supreme Court appointments,[78] but had great faith in representative democracy, responding to complaints about politicians and mediocrity in government with exhortations to "get more involved and help fix it.

"[86] White first met his wife Marion Stearns (1921–2009), the daughter of the president of the University of Colorado, when she was in high school and he was a college football player.