Harry Blackmun

Harry Andrew Blackmun (November 12, 1908 – March 4, 1999) was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 to 1994. He is best known as the author of the majority opinion in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, overturning laws restricting abortion in the United States.

Post-Supreme Court

Blackmun retired from the Supreme Court in 1994 and died in 1999, from complications from hip replacement surgery.

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Five years later in 2004, at Blackmun's will, the Library of Congress released his voluminous files. Blackmun had kept all the documents from every case, notes the Justices passed between themselves, ten percent of the mail he received, and numerous other documents. And after Blackmun announced his retirement from the Court, he recorded a 38-hour oral history with Yale professor Harold Koh which was also released. In it, he discusses his thoughts on everything from his important Court cases to the Supreme Court piano. Some legal scholars such as David Garrow have criticized Blackmun's recollections as inaccurate and self-serving, especially his recollections of the internal deliberations on Roe v. Wade.

Related Topics:
2004 - Library of Congress - Yale - Harold Koh

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The Blackmun papers also reveal Blackmun's heavy reliance on his law clerks. Blackmun was sometimes reduced to being "a clerk for his clerks," performing the menial and prosaic task of checking his clerks' citations on opinions that they had written for him, a job normally reserved for clerks. For example, Blackmun's widely-quoted dissent in 1986's Bowers v. Hardwick was written entirely by his law clerk Pamela Karlan, now a professor at Stanford. Blackmun's papers also reveal a justice who was unusually thin-skinned; he complained bitterly when one term he was assigned fewer opinions than the other justices.

Related Topics:
Bowers v. Hardwick - Pamela Karlan - Stanford

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Blackmun is the only Supreme Court justice to have played one in a motion picture. In 1997, he portrayed Justice Joseph Story in the movie Amistad.

Related Topics:
Joseph Story - Amistad

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