Blackmun, Harry Andrew

Related Category: Supreme Court: Biographies

(blăk´mən), 1908–99, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1970–94), b. Nashville, Ill. Educated at Harvard, he practiced law privately, was general counsel to the Mayo Clinic (1950–59), then became a federal circuit court judge. He was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Nixon. Blackmun was initially allied with the conservatives on the court, including his boyhood friend Warren Burger, but is best known for his 1973 majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, legalizing abortion. By the 1980s he tended toward a liberal view in most areas, particularly civil-rights cases.

See L. Greenhouse, Becoming Justice Blackmun (2005).