Blackmun's drift: Linda Greenhouse charts, but doesn't explain, how a conservative justice came to write Roe v. Wade.

• Author: Pomper, Stephen
• Position: Becoming Justice Blackmun Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey - Book Review

Becoming Justice Blackmun Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey By Linda Greenhouse Times' Books, $25.00

There is something about Harry Blackmun that makes him a sentimental favorite of many of us in the liberal bar.

Well, several things. Blackmun was perhaps the most prominent in a line of ideological apostates (i.e., Republican appointees who took a left turn) that stretched from him to John Paul Stevens to David Souter and includes (in much lesser measure) Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy. Though a Nixon appointee, he went on to write Roe v. Wade, and over time staked out positions that resonated with liberal policy views on issues like affirmative action and the death penalty. But it wasn't just what Blackmun said; it was the way he said it. Perhaps things look different decades from now, but to contemporary eyes, it seems that today's left-of-center Supreme Court justices crank out their opinions in prose that is narrow, technocratic, and mostly forgettable. (Who but the most committed constitutional law geek would recognize a single line from any of Stephen Breyer's opinions?) By contrast, Blackmun knew how to speak a different language--one that was deeply moral, forceful, and humane. Sometimes he could be highly personal. When, after decades of deliberation, he decided in 1994 to renounce capital punishment he proclaimed: "I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death." And when summing up the case of a sad little boy abused by his father into profound retardation while local authorities dithered, Blackmun went right to the heart of the matter. "Poor Joshua!" he famously wrote.

But for all his attractive qualities, Blackmun's jurisprudence has left a mixed legacy for liberals. The legal solidity of Roe has been questioned by both the right and the left, and political shocks created by the opinion have not been an unalloyed blessing to the Democratic Party. Even fans of the policies that undergird much of Blackmun's jurisprudence may be forgiven for asking: Did he strike the right balance between head and heart? Or, upon solemn reflection, might even liberals conclude that Blackmun reached too far with Roe, that his opinions could be too personal and impassioned, and that the left is possibly better off with the dryly competent--if not especially inspired--style of today's liberal justices? Disappointingly, Linda Greenhouse's new biography, Becoming Justice Blackmun, fails to wrestle with these questions, but her...