Blackmun, Harry Andrew (1908-1999), served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 to 1994. Blackmun had been appointed to the court by President Richard M. Nixon.
During his early years on the Supreme Court, Blackmun generally voted with the other three conservative justices appointed by Nixon. The group consisted of Blackmun, Warren E. Burger, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and William H. Rehnquist. In 1973, however, Blackmun took a liberal position when he wrote the court’s majority opinion in the case of Roe v. Wade. This decision essentially prohibited states from interfering with a woman’s right to have an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy. Beginning in the late 1970’s, Blackmun generally sided with the liberal justices William J. Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.
Blackmun was born on Nov. 12, 1908, in Nashville, Illinois, but grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was a boyhood friend of Burger’s. Blackmun graduated from Harvard University in 1929 and from Harvard Law School in 1932. After spending a year as a law clerk in St. Paul, he joined a Minneapolis law firm specializing in tax and probate law. In 1950, his interest in medical law led him to become general counsel for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Blackmun held that position until 1959, when he was appointed as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in Minnesota.
Blackmun was Nixon’s third nominee to fill the U.S. Supreme Court seat left vacant by the resignation in 1969 of Justice Abe Fortas. The Senate rejected the President’s first two nominees–United States Circuit Judge Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr., of South Carolina and Federal District Judge G. Harrold Carswell of Florida. Blackmun died on March 4, 1999.
