Blackmun, Harry A. (1908–)

• Author: Burt Neuborne
• Pages: 189-191

Page 189

Nothing in Harry A. Blackmun's background presaged that within three years of his appointment he would write the most controversial Supreme Court opinion of his time?ROE V. WADE (1972)?providing significant constitutional protection to women and their doctors in the area of abortion.

After graduating from public school in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he and WARREN E. BURGER were elementary school classmates, young Blackmun attended Harvard College, having graduated in 1929 summa cum laude, and Harvard Law School, being graduated in 1932. He practiced law in St. Paul and then as resident counsel at the

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Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. In 1959 President DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER appointed him to the Eighth Circuit, where he served for eleven unremarkable years until, in 1970, President RICHARD M. NIXON selected him to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the resignation of Justice ABE FORTAS.

Blackmun's early years on the Supreme Court did little to disturb his image as a judicial clone of his boyhood friend Warren Burger, at whose wedding he had served as best man. The two voted together so often that the press dubbed them the Minnesota Twins.

Blackmun's voting patterns shifted over the years until by the mid-1980s he was more likely to vote with Justices WILLIAM J. BRENNAN and THURGOOD MARSHALL in defense of a broad vision of constitutional rights than with Burger. When asked whether his views have changed, Blackmun asserts that he has remained constant while the Court has shifted, causing his recent opinions merely to appear more libertarian. If, however, one compares early and late Blackmun opinions, it is difficult to accept Blackmun's protestation that nothing has changed in his legal universe except the backdrop.

One widely held hypothesis seeking to explain Blackmun's apparent shift in views is linked to the stormy public reaction that greeted what is undoubtedly his most significant Supreme Court opinion?Roe v. Wade. In Roe, drawing on his years at the Mayo Clinic, Blackmun brought a medical perspective to the controversy over the constitutionality of state laws prohibiting abortion. In a now familiar construct, he divided pregnancy into trimesters, holding that the state had no compelling interest in preserving fetal life during the first two trimesters, but that the interest in viable fetal life became compelling in the final trimester. In the years following Roe, Blackmun vigorously defended the right of a pregnant woman, in consultation with her doctor, to decide freely whether to undergo an abortion, writing a series of opinions striking down state statutes designed to place obstacles in a...