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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

arry Andrew Blackmun was born on November 12, 1908, in Nashville, HIllinois. He grew up in - St. Paul, . His father, Corwin Man- ning Blackmun, owned a grocery store and then a hardware store during Harry’s child- hood years. His mother was Theo Huegely Ruetner Blackmun. Harry attended kinder- garten 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 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and majored in mathe- matics. He earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in 1929 and promptly entered , 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 Law School. In 1950 he became general legal counsel, or lead attorney, to the world-famous , 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, Black-

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Defining Moments: Roe v. Wade

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 , who had been accused of breaking vari- ous rules of ethics. Republican President Richard M. Nixon first nominated fed- eral 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 nom- inate 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 Black- mun 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 phi- losophy than it had shown in the 1950s and 1960s under Chief Justice . 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 “.” 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 Black- mun’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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Biographies: Harry A. Blackmun

which made abortion legal across the . Writing for the 7-2 majority, Blackmun declared that the legal included a woman’s right to abortion. Specifically, Blackmun wrote that the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution protect- ed 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 Black- mun 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 sup- porter 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 abor- tion rights in America. In his dissent in the 1989 abortion case Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, Blackmun warned that his colleagues were chip- ping 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 disproportion- ately 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, , 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: ’s Supreme Court Journey. New York: Times Books, 2006. Greenhouse, Linda. “Documents Reveal the 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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