Эдвард Дуглас Уайт: Жизнь и карьера американского юриста и политика.

Chief justice of the United States from 1910 to 1921
the U. S. politician (1795 1847)

Born in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, White practiced law in New Orleans after graduating from the University of Louisiana, now Tulane University. He also attended the College of the Immaculate Conception, present day Jesuit High School in New Orleans, class of 1865. His father, Edward Douglass White Sr., was the 10th Governor of Louisiana and a Whig US Representative. White fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War and was captured in 1865. After the war, White won election to the Louisiana State Senate and served on the Louisiana Supreme Court. As a member of the Democratic Party, White represented Louisiana in the United States Senate from 1891 to 1894. In 1894, President Grover Cleveland appointed White as an associate Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court. In 1910, President William Howard Taft elevated him to the position of chief justice. The appointment surprised many contemporaries, as Taft was a member of the Republican Party. White served as chief justice until his death in 1921, when he was succeeded by Taft. White sided with the Supreme Court majority in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the legality of state segregation to provide "separate but equal" public facilities in the United States, despite the "equal protection of the laws" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In one of several challenges to Southern states' grandfather clauses, used to disfranchise African American voters at the turn of the century, he wrote for a unanimous court in Guinn v. United States, which struck many of them down. He also wrote the opinion in the Selective Draft Law Cases, which upheld the constitutionality of conscription.

White was born on November 3, 1845, on his family's sugar plantation near Thibodaux, Louisiana, about thirty miles to the west of New Orleans. His father, Edward Douglass White Sr., was a lawyer and judge who had served as a U. S. Representative and as the governor of Louisiana. Efn|White Sr. was the son of James White, a doctor and lawyer who held various political positions in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Louisiana. The couple had five children, of whom White Jr. was the youngest son. At Georgetown, he studied the classics, the flute, and the violin; he also participated in the school's cadet corp.

While living on his family's abandoned plantation, White began his legal studies. He enrolled at the University of Louisiana in New Orleans to complete his study of the law, at what is now known as Tulane University Law School. He subsequently was admitted to the bar and commenced practice in New Orleans in 1868. He was also mentored as a young attorney by Edouard Bermudez, a New Orleans lawyer who later served as chief justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court. White served in the Louisiana State Senate in 1874, a year marked by interracial violence in political campaigns and elections. He also served on the Louisiana Supreme Court from 1878 to 1880.

White was nominated by President Grover Cleveland to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States on February 19, 1894, after the Senate had rejected his first two nominees: William B. Hornblower and Wheeler Hazard Peckham. In contrast to those nominations, the Senate confirmed White the same day on a voice vote. He also participated in the Insular Cases of the early 20th century regarding the relationship of the United States to its territories acquired in the Spanish–American War, where he concurred with the 5–4 decision in Downes v. Bidwell (1901) that the newly annexed territories were not properly part of the United States for purposes of the Constitution in several ways. However, wrote White, the constitutional guarantees of a citizen's rights of liberty and property were applicable to all and "cannot be under any circumstances transcended."

On December 12, 1910, President William Howard Taft nominated White to become Chief Justice of the United States, Nonetheless, the Senate confirmed White the same day, and again on a voice vote. During his tenure as chief justice, White swore in presidents Woodrow Wilson (twice) and Warren G. Harding. At the time of his death on May 21, 1921, he had served on the Court for a total of years, of them as chief justice.

White married Leita Montgomery Kent, the widow of Linden Kent, on November 6, 1894, in New York City. His wife was the daughter of Romonzo and Virginia High Montgomery; White proposed to her before her first marriage but was turned down, and proposed again after her first husband died in 1892.

In 1914, he was awarded the Laetare Medal by the University of Notre Dame, the oldest and most prestigious award for American Catholics. A statue of White is one of the two honoring Louisiana natives in the National Statuary Hall in the U. S. Capitol. A statue of White was located in front of the Louisiana Supreme Court building in New Orleans until it was removed in December 2020. This statue was a local landmark on the New Orleans scene, created by Bryant Baker, who was selected for the commission by White's widow, and dedicated April 8, 1926. In his honor, the Louisiana State University Law Center founded the annual Edward Douglass White Lectures. They have featured such distinguished speakers as U. S. chief justices Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist. The play, Father Chief Justice: Edward Douglass White and the Constitution by Paul Baier, a professor at LSU Law Center, was based on White's life. In 1995, White was posthumously inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield. Edward Douglass White Council #2473 of the Knights of Columbus in Arlington, Virginia, was named in his honor, but dropped the name in August 2020. The Chief Justice White Council #2586 of the Knights of Columbus in Bogota, New Jersey, is also named in his honor. Edward Douglas White Catholic High School in Thibodaux, Louisiana, was named for him. During World War II the Liberty ship was built in Brunswick, Georgia, and named in his honor.