The Judicial Bookshelf

Author: Stephenson Jr. D.G.

Source: Journal of Supreme Court History, Volume 28, Number 1, March 2003 , pp. 81-97(17)

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Abstract:

The death of Justice Byron R. White on April 15, 2002, occasioned numerous assessments, as had happened when he retired in 1993. From his perspective, he was the accidental jurist. “Well, I never wanted to be a judge,” he confessed to a reporter in a rare interview in 1999. “I said to the president I would give it a try.” White's “try” lasted thirty-one years, among the longest tenures of twentieth-century Justices. Yet many appraisals of White passed over a critical point: the Supreme Court in 1993 was a very different institution from the one he joined in 1962. This was true beyond the obvious changes in personnel. No one on the bench in 1962 was still sitting when White retired. In 1962, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who succeeded him, was only four years out of Harvard Law School and was completing a year as a research associate at Columbia University Law School prior to joining the professorate at Rutgers in Newark.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1059-4329.00029

Affiliations: 1: Franklin and Marshall College

Publication date: 2003-03-01