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Harry A. Blackmun (1908-1999)
U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Author of the Majority Opinion in the Roe v.
Wade Case
H
arry Andrew Blackmun was born on
November 12, 1908, in Nashville,
Illinois. He grew up in MinneapolisSt. Paul, Minnesota. His father, Corwin Manning Blackmun, owned a grocery store and
then a hardware store during Harry’s childhood years. His mother was Theo Huegely
Ruetner Blackmun. Harry attended kindergarten with Warren E. Burger, and the two
boys struck up a close friendship that lasted
into the 1970s, when they served together on
the U.S. Supreme Court.
A Distinguished Legal Career
After graduating from public high school in St. Paul, Blackmun enrolled
at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and majored in mathematics. He earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in 1929 and promptly
entered Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1932. After a brief
stint as a law clerk to a federal appeals court judge, Blackmun took a teaching
position at the St. Paul College of Law. He also became an attorney with
Dorsey, Colman, Barker, Scott and Barber, a top Minneapolis firm, where he
specialized in estate and tax law. On June 21, 1941, he married Dorothy E.
Clark, with whom he eventually had three daughters.
In 1943 Blackmun was made a full partner in his law firm, and two years
later he began teaching at the University of Minnesota Law School. In 1950
he became general legal counsel, or lead attorney, to the world-famous Mayo
Clinic, a medical facility based in Rochester, Minnesota. The next several
years were among the most enjoyable and satisfying of Blackmun’s life, both
personally and professionally.
In 1959 President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Blackmun to the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit Court. During the next decade, Black125
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mun gained a reputation as a conservative, “law-and-order” judge—although
he also proved sympathetic to civil rights causes in several cases.
A “Safe” Choice
In 1969 Blackmun’s life was forever changed by the abrupt resignation of
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, who had been accused of breaking various rules of ethics. Republican President Richard M. Nixon first nominated federal judge Clement F. Haynesworth, Jr., to replace Fortas. But the U.S. Senate,
which was controlled by the Democratic Party, refused to confirm Haynesworth
because of concerns that he was hostile to civil rights. Nixon’s second nominee,
federal judge G. Harrold Carswell, was rejected for the same reason.
Angered and frustrated by the Senate opposition, Nixon decided to nominate Blackmun, whom he viewed as a reliably conservative judge whose
record on civil rights cases would satisfy the Democrats. Blackmun’s lifelong
friend Warren Burger, who had become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in
June 1969, applauded Nixon’s choice. Senate Democrats approved of Blackmun as well. He was confirmed in the Senate by a 94-0 vote on May 12, 1970,
less than a month after Nixon had announced his nomination.
During the first few years that Blackmun sat on the Supreme Court
bench, he was widely viewed as a faithful follower of Burger. At that time,
Burger was seeking to steer the Court toward a more conservative legal philosophy than it had shown in the 1950s and 1960s under Chief Justice Earl
Warren. Blackmun voted so often with Burger during his first years on the
court that the boyhood chums were sometimes jointly referred to by court
watchers as the “Minnesota Twins.”
As time passed and Blackmun’s confidence increased, however, he
emerged as an independent-minded judge who did not always vote in line
with mainstream conservative thought. These votes, combined with Blackmun’s disapproval of Burger’s unpredictable leadership style, led to a rupture
in their friendship that was never repaired. By the late 1970s the two men
were barely speaking to one another.
Blackmun and Roe v. Wade
Blackmun’s most famous and controversial moment as a Supreme Court
justice came in 1973, when he wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade,
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which made abortion legal across the United States. Writing for the 7-2
majority, Blackmun declared that the legal right to privacy included a
woman’s right to abortion. Specifically, Blackmun wrote that the First,
Fourth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution protected an individual’s “zone of privacy” against intrusive state laws in such areas
as marriage, parenting, and contraception, including “a woman’s decision
whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”
Blackmun’s leading role in the Roe v. Wade decision made him a hero to
millions of people who supported legal abortion. But Americans who
opposed legal abortion bitterly criticized his vote and his opinion, and Blackmun received huge volumes of hate mail for the rest of his life because of his
stand on Roe v. Wade.
Blackmun was unfazed by the controversy. He remained a reliable supporter of abortion rights for the remainder of his time on the Court. In 1977,
for example, he was incensed when the Supreme Court upheld a law making it
illegal for poor women to receive federal assistance in paying for abortions.
“There is another world ‘out there,’ the existence of which the Court, I suspect,
either chooses to ignore or fears to recognize,” Blackmun wrote in his dissent.
As time passed, Blackmun publicly wondered about the future of abortion rights in America. In his dissent in the 1989 abortion case Webster v.
Reproductive Health Services, Blackmun warned that his colleagues were chipping away at Roe v. Wade by allowing too many restrictions on abortion rights.
He also charged that the Court was giving the federal government too much
power to intrude into women’s lives. “I fear for the future,” he wrote. “The
signs are evident and ominous, and a chill wind blows.”
Blackmun retired from the Supreme Court in early 1994. Speaking at a
farewell press conference, the judge offered a spirited defense of his most famous
opinion. “Roe against Wade hit me early in my tenure on the Supreme Court,”
he said. “And people forget that it was a 7-to-2 decision. They always typify it as
a Blackmun opinion. But I’ll say what I’ve said many times publicly—I think it
was right in 1973, and I think it was right today. It’s a step that had to be taken as
we go down the road toward the full emancipation of women.”
Abortion was not the only issue for which Blackmun became known,
however. During his 24 years on the Court, he emerged as a fierce defender of
First Amendment rights and especially of free speech. He also evolved into a
strong critic of capital punishment, which he had supported earlier in his
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career. Blackmun became convinced that death sentences were disproportionately given to minorities and poor people, and that innocent people had been
put to death. He also believed that capital punishment had no deterrent
effect, and was simply a tool of revenge. “The death-penalty experiment has
failed,” he said. “I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.”
Blackmun died at Arlington Hospital in Arlington, Virginia, on March 4,
1999, following complications from hip-replacement surgery. In accordance
with his wishes, his private papers were released to the public in March 2004,
five years after his death. According to Supreme Court scholars, these papers
provided a treasure chest of information about the inner workings of the
Supreme Court during his tenure.
Sources:
Greenhouse, Linda. Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey. New York:
Times Books, 2006.
Greenhouse, Linda. “Documents Reveal the Evolution of a Justice,” New York Times, March 4, 2004.
National Public Radio (NPR) Online. “Justice Harry Blackmun’s Papers,” March 2004, www.npr.org/
news/specials/blackmun.
Schwartz, Bernard. A History of the Supreme Court. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Woodward, Bob, and Scott Armstrong. The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1979.
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