# Harry Blackmun Associate Justice of the [[Supreme Court of the United States]] from 1970 to 1994 — a Nixon appointee who became the Court's most liberal member. Harry Blackmun is the author of [[Roe v. Wade]] (1973), the most consequential and most contested opinion of the twentieth century, overturned nearly fifty years later by [[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization]] (2022). His quarter-century on the bench is the definitive case study in ideological evolution: a conservative Midwestern judge, appointed as [[Warren Burger]]'s ideological twin, who drifted steadily leftward until he was writing passionate dissents against the death penalty and the Court's abandonment of the poor. The conservative legal movement studied Blackmun's trajectory as a cautionary tale and designed the [[Federalist Society]] vetting pipeline specifically to prevent another justice from "growing" on the bench. ## Background and Career Born November 12, 1908, in Nashville, Illinois, raised in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area. Blackmun attended Harvard College on a scholarship (BA in mathematics, 1929) and Harvard Law School (JD, 1932). At Harvard College, Blackmun was a classmate of [[Warren Burger]] — the beginning of a friendship that would shape both their careers and eventually fracture on the bench. After law school, Blackmun clerked for Judge John B. Sanborn on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, then practiced law in Minneapolis. From 1950 to 1959, he served as resident counsel to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota — an experience with medical institutions and medical decision-making that would directly inform his approach to [[Roe v. Wade]]. In 1959, [[Dwight D. Eisenhower]] appointed Blackmun to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he served for eleven years as a careful, moderate-to-conservative jurist. His Eighth Circuit tenure overlapped with the implementation of [[Brown v. Board of Education]] and the passage of the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]] — the great legislative achievements of the [[Civil Rights Movement]] that were reshaping the federal judiciary's role. ## Nomination and Confirmation [[Richard Nixon]] nominated Blackmun to the [[Supreme Court of the United States]] in 1970, after the Senate had rejected two previous nominees — Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell — whom Nixon had selected as part of his [[Southern Strategy]] to reward the white South. The rejections humiliated Nixon and inflamed his resentment of the [[Senate Judiciary Committee]] and the [[Democratic Party]] majority. Blackmun was the safe, confirmable choice: a Midwestern [[Republican Party]] member, a longtime friend of Chief Justice [[Warren Burger]], and a judge with no controversial record. The [[Senate Judiciary Committee]] confirmed him unanimously, 94-0. He took the seat vacated by the resignation of [[Abe Fortas]], whose ethics scandal had created the vacancy Nixon was now filling. Nixon expected a reliably conservative vote. Early coverage of the Court dubbed Blackmun and Burger the "Minnesota Twins" for their synchronized voting. That synchronization lasted roughly three years. ## The Minnesota Twins — and the Drift Apart In his first terms, Blackmun voted closely with [[Warren Burger]] — conservative on criminal procedure, skeptical of expansive [[Fourteenth Amendment]] readings, deferential to institutional authority. The two Minnesotans appeared to be exactly the kind of paired conservative block Nixon wanted. But [[Roe v. Wade]] began the separation. Burger joined the majority but wrote a narrow concurrence; Blackmun authored a sweeping opinion grounding abortion rights in the [[Constitution]]'s implied right to [[Privacy]]. From that point forward, Blackmun moved left on issue after issue — on the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]], [[Affirmative Action]], [[Free Speech]], the [[Eighth Amendment]], and the rights of the poor — while Burger remained in the conservative center. By the mid-1980s, they were barely speaking. The friendship that had helped put Blackmun on the Court was destroyed by the jurisprudential distance between them. ## Roe v. Wade (1973) The opinion that defined Blackmun's career and reshaped American politics. In a 7-2 decision, Blackmun wrote that the [[Fourteenth Amendment]]'s Due Process Clause contains a right to [[Privacy]] broad enough to encompass a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy. He drew on his experience at the Mayo Clinic to construct a trimester framework balancing the state's interests against the woman's autonomy. The [[Bill of Rights]] had never explicitly mentioned abortion, but Blackmun built on the framework established in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which had located a right to privacy in the penumbras of the [[First Amendment]], [[Fourth Amendment]], [[Fifth Amendment]], and [[Ninth Amendment]]. Roe became the organizing principle for the modern [[Abortion Politics]] wars. The decision catalyzed the rise of the [[Moral Majority]], energized the [[Christian Right Timeline]], and became the primary target of the [[Conservative Court Capture Timeline]]. The [[Heritage Foundation]], the [[Federalist Society]], and the [[Dark Money]] network [[Leonard Leo]] built over the next four decades all identified overturning Roe as the movement's central judicial objective. The [[Alliance Defending Freedom]], the [[Becket Fund]], and allied organizations in the [[Religious Liberty]] movement all traced their strategic origins to the post-Roe backlash. Blackmun received death threats for the rest of his life. A bullet was fired through his apartment window in 1985. He kept a running tally of the hate mail — and also the grateful letters from women who said the decision had saved their lives. When the Court narrowed but upheld Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Blackmun wrote a partial concurrence and partial dissent, warning that the right hung by a single vote: "I am 83 years old. I cannot remain on this Court forever, and when I do step down, the confirmation process for my successor well may focus on the issue before us today." He was right. His seat went to a [[Bill Clinton]] appointment, but the confirmation wars he predicted intensified with each subsequent vacancy until the [[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization]] majority finally did what the movement had spent fifty years building toward. ## Ideological Evolution Blackmun's leftward drift was not a single event but a steady accumulation across multiple areas of law: **Civil rights:** He moved from skepticism of expansive [[Fourteenth Amendment]] equal protection readings to strong support for [[Affirmative Action]] and civil rights enforcement. He joined the dissenters in [[Regents of the University of California v. Bakke]] (1978) who would have upheld racial quotas, and later joined [[Ruth Bader Ginsburg]] and others in defending affirmative action programs — positions the current Court rejected in [[Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard]] (2023) and [[Fisher v. Texas I and II]]. **Gay rights:** In [[Bowers v. Hardwick]] (1986), when the Burger Court upheld Georgia's sodomy law, Blackmun wrote one of the most famous dissents in Court history, arguing that the case was not about a "fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy" but about "the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men — the right to be let alone." The majority opinion was not overturned until [[Lawrence v. Texas]] (2003), which vindicated Blackmun's position and laid the groundwork for [[Obergefell v. Hodges]] (2015) and [[United States v. Windsor]] (2013). **Women's rights and equality:** Beyond Roe, Blackmun became a reliable vote for gender equality under the [[Fourteenth Amendment]], joining opinions that expanded protections against workplace harassment and sex discrimination. **The poor and powerless:** His dissent in DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989) — "Poor Joshua!" — became a touchstone for legal scholars and advocates who argued that the [[Constitution]] imposes affirmative obligations on the state to protect vulnerable citizens. Four-year-old Joshua DeShaney was beaten into permanent brain damage by his father while county social workers documented the abuse and did nothing. The 6-3 majority held that the [[Fourteenth Amendment]] does not require the state to protect individuals from private violence. Blackmun's two-word opening — "Poor Joshua!" — became one of the most famous dissent openers in the Court's history. ## Death Penalty Reversal The culmination of Blackmun's evolution. He had voted with the majority in Gregg v. Georgia (1976) to reinstate the death penalty after the Court had struck it down in Furman v. Georgia (1972), believing that proper procedural safeguards could make capital punishment constitutional under the [[Eighth Amendment]]. By 1994, he had concluded he was wrong. In his dissent from the denial of certiorari in Callins v. Collins, Blackmun declared: "From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death." He argued that twenty years of experience had proven that no set of procedural rules could eliminate the arbitrary and racially discriminatory application of the death penalty — a conclusion reinforced by the racial disparities documented in the [[Jim Crow Era]]'s legacy in Southern criminal justice systems. The opinion was a public confession that he had been complicit in an unconstitutional system — an extraordinary act of intellectual honesty from a sitting justice. His evolution on capital punishment paralleled the broader shift in [[Liberalism]] on criminal justice, anticipating debates that would intensify decades later. Blackmun retired later that year, in 1994. [[Bill Clinton]] filled his seat. Blackmun died on March 4, 1999, in Arlington, Virginia. ## Analytical Framework Harry Blackmun is the justice the conservative legal movement built its entire vetting infrastructure to prevent. His evolution from Nixon conservative to passionate liberal proved that lifetime appointment could produce ideological "drift" — that a justice freed from electoral accountability might follow the logic of cases and the weight of human suffering rather than the political preferences of the president who appointed him. The [[Federalist Society]]'s response was to create a pipeline — law school chapters, clerkship networks, the short list system managed by [[Leonard Leo]] and funded through the [[Marble Freedom Trust]] and other [[Dark Money]] vehicles — designed to identify and promote judges whose conservative commitments were deep enough to survive the institutional pressures of the Court. The [[Federalist Society Founding]] in 1982 came nine years into Blackmun's drift. [[Clarence Thomas]], [[Samuel Alito]], [[Neil Gorsuch]], [[Brett Kavanaugh]], and [[Amy Coney Barrett]] are all products of this system. The parallel evolution of [[Sandra Day O'Connor]] and [[John Roberts]] — both appointed as conservatives who occasionally broke with the movement — shows that the Blackmun problem has never been fully solved, only mitigated. The question of whether the current 6-3 majority will hold or whether another Blackmun-style evolution will occur is the central uncertainty in the [[Conservative Court Capture Timeline]]. The irony of the [[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization]] decision overturning [[Roe v. Wade]] is that it validated both Blackmun's fear and his legacy: the right he articulated was always as fragile as the composition of the Court, and the movement that spent fifty years building a majority to overturn it proved that [[Judicial Capture]] works. The [[Merrick Garland]] blockade, the [[Antonin Scalia]] vacancy strategy, the [[Tenth Amendment]] federalism arguments, and the [[Originalism]] framework deployed in Dobbs were all tools developed to undo what Blackmun built. Blackmun's career also illuminates the tension between [[Rule of Law]] and [[Separation of Powers]]: a justice appointed to serve one president's political agenda instead followed his own reading of the [[Constitution]], the [[Bill of Rights]], and the evolving standards of decency — exactly what lifetime tenure was designed to enable and exactly what the modern [[Republican Party]]'s judicial strategy was designed to prevent. ## See Also - [[Roe v. Wade]] — The opinion that defined his career and transformed American politics - [[Warren Burger]] — The "Minnesota Twin" whose friendship fractured over jurisprudential distance - [[Richard Nixon]] — The president who appointed him expecting a conservative vote - [[William Rehnquist]] — Fellow Nixon appointee who moved the Court in the opposite direction - [[Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization]] — The 2022 decision that overturned Blackmun's most important work - [[Supreme Court of the United States]] — The institution where his evolution played out - [[Federalist Society]] — The organization built to prevent another Blackmun - [[Conservative Court Capture Timeline]] — The movement that targeted Roe for fifty years - [[Abortion Politics]] — The political landscape Roe created - [[Bowers v. Hardwick]] — The sodomy case where his dissent was vindicated seventeen years later - [[Privacy]] — The constitutional right at the center of Roe