Blackmun Harry Andrew in the United States
Blackmun Harry Andrew
Harry Andrew Blackmun (1908-1999), associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 to 1994. He began his tenure on the Court as a conservative appointee of Republican president Richard M. Nixon, but by the time of his retirement Blackmun had become known as one of the Court’s most reliable advocates of civil liberties. As the author of the majority opinion of the Court in Roe v. Wade (1973), Blackmun became for many the personal symbol of the abortion issue. (The Roe case was a landmark decision that described a constitutional right to privacy that encompasses a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy within the first six months.) As a result of his strong dissent in a 1994 case involving the death penalty, Blackmun was also associated with the controversial issue of capital punishment.
Blackmun was born in Nashville, Illinois, and grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He graduated from Harvard University in 1929 with a degree in mathematics. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1932, Blackmun returned to Minnesota to practice law. He taught for a year at the St. Paul College of Law (now the William Mitchell College of Law) and then joined a prestigious private firm in Minneapolis. In 1950 he left private practice to become general counsel for the Mayo Clinic, a medical research and treatment center in Rochester, Minnesota. In 1959 President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Blackmun to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Blackmun served on the circuit court until 1970, when Nixon appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In his early decisions, Blackmun’s votes on cases closely paralleled those of Chief Justice Warren Burger and supported the authority of government over the rights of the individual. For example, in 1971 Blackmun joined Burger in dissenting in the so-called Pentagon Papers case (New York Times v. United States). In that decision, the majority of the Court refused to block publication of a classified study of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Blackmun also sided with the position of the government in Cohen v. California (1971), a case that involved governmental regulation of free expression. However, as time went on, Blackmun’s votes more clearly supported the rights of the individual to be free from governmental regulation. In his dissent in the 1986 case of Bowers v. Hardwick, Blackmun objected to the majority’s refusal to extend the right of privacy to cover consensual homosexual acts. Opposing the majority’s support for a criminal prohibition on sodomy, Blackmun wrote of protecting the “right most valued by civilized men – the right to be left alone.”
In the 1994 case of Callins v. Collins, Blackmun reversed his longtime support of decisions upholding the death penalty. Although he did not regard the death penalty as “cruel and unusual punishment” (and therefore prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States), Blackmun’s dissent in Callins concluded that the Court’s attempts to ensure fairness in applying the death penalty had failed. That same year, at age 85, Blackmun retired from the Court. (1)
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