President's pages.

• Author: Horwich, Benjamin

A lifetime is a very, very long time--especially when infused with dedication and constancy. Volume Fifty-Five of the Stanford Law Review has the melancholy task of marking the passing of two such dedicated and constant figures of the legal landscape: We offer a series of tributes to Justice Byron R. White in this issue, and our third issue will pay tribute to Professor Gerald Gunther. I am humbled to think that few (if any) of the current members of this journal have been alive for as many years as Justice White sat on the Supreme Court or as long as Professor Gunther sculpted his casebook. (1) But the obverse of humility is inspiration, and it is surely inspiring to imagine what one might accomplish in a lifetime of such dedication and constancy as theirs.

The tributes to Justice White in the pages that follow offer firsthand accounts of these qualities: Chief Justice William Rehnquist captures Justice White's constancy in likening him to a "balance wheel." (2) Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recalls and reaffirms her aspiration to match Justice White's dedication. (3) Judge David Ebel closes his tribute with a story and poem that capture what it meant for the Justice to be steadfast and true to one's commitments. (4) Former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach describes the Byron White who was a central and ever-creative figure in the Kennedy Justice Department. (5) The title of Tom Campbell's tribute says it all. (6) David Frederick, who clerked for Justice White in the antepenultimate Term of the Justice's tenure, paints a picture of an energy and focus undimmed by three decades on the Court. (7)

Justice White was dedicated to what he saw as the Court's job, which he famously and tersely described at the time of his confirmation as "to decide cases." By all accounts in the pages that follow, this was as much his philosophy at his confirmation as it was when he...