Justice Harry Blackmun served on the United States Supreme Court for twenty-four years, from 1970 to 1994, and wrote the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade. He arrived as a cautious Midwestern conservative chosen by Richard Nixon and left as one of the Court’s most liberal members, a transformation that reshaped how legal historians think about judicial evolution on the bench.
Background and Path to the Supreme Court
Blackmun was born on November 12, 1908, in Nashville, Illinois, and grew up near St. Paul, Minnesota. He attended Harvard College on scholarship, graduated in 1929, and earned his law degree from Harvard in 1932.1Federal Judicial Center. Blackmun, Harry Andrew He clerked for a federal judge on the Eighth Circuit, then spent roughly sixteen years in private practice in Minneapolis handling taxation, trusts, and civil litigation.
In 1950, Blackmun became resident counsel at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, the institution’s first in-house lawyer. He spent nearly a decade there working on medical law and healthcare regulation, an immersion that would later show up in his approach to cases involving medicine, physicians, and reproductive rights. In 1959, President Eisenhower nominated him to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he wrote more than two hundred opinions over the next eleven years.2Justia. Justice Harry Blackmun
Blackmun was not Nixon’s first choice for the Supreme Court. The Senate had rejected Clement Haynsworth and then G. Harrold Carswell, both with questions raised about their civil rights records and qualifications. On his third attempt, Nixon nominated Blackmun on April 15, 1970.2Justia. Justice Harry Blackmun The Senate confirmed him unanimously, 94–0. Nixon wanted a reliable conservative, and nothing in Blackmun’s methodical career suggested otherwise.
From “Minnesota Twin” to Liberal Voice
Blackmun and Chief Justice Warren Burger had been childhood friends in St. Paul, attending the same grade school and remaining close for decades. When Blackmun joined the Court, the press noticed their frequent voting alignment and dubbed them the “Minnesota Twins.” In his early terms, Blackmun generally voted with the conservative bloc.
That alignment did not hold. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Blackmun drifted steadily toward a more expansive view of individual rights. By the mid-1980s, he was voting with the Court’s liberal wing far more often than with its conservatives. His friendship with Burger deteriorated along the same timeline, strained by ideological distance and personal friction until it ended entirely. Blackmun later described himself as having been “mugged by reality” through years of confronting the human consequences of the cases that came before him.
Roe v. Wade
Blackmun’s most consequential opinion was Roe v. Wade, decided 7–2 in 1973. The ruling held that the Constitution protects a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy, grounding that right in a concept of privacy derived from the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.3Congress.gov. Amdt14.S1.6.4.1 Abortion, Roe v. Wade, and Pre-Dobbs Doctrine The opinion leaned heavily on medical history, and Blackmun’s Mayo Clinic years were visible throughout. He framed the question partly as one of a physician’s ability to practice without undue state interference, and he structured the right around a trimester framework tied to fetal viability and maternal health.4Justia. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973)
The decision became one of the most debated rulings in American history. Legal scholars criticized its reasoning even when they agreed with the outcome, calling it legislative in character. Blackmun received tens of thousands of letters, many threatening, and carried the weight of the decision for the rest of his life.
Roe’s framework was substantially narrowed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, when a plurality replaced the trimester system with an “undue burden” standard. Blackmun wrote separately in Casey, arguing that Roe should be fully reaffirmed and warning that the right it recognized hung by a single vote.5Legal Information Institute. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 In 2022, the Supreme Court overruled both Roe and Casey in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, holding that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and returning the question to state legislatures.6Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022)
Other Major Majority Opinions
Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985)
Writing for a 5–4 majority, Blackmun held that the federal government could require state and local employers to comply with minimum wage and overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. The decision overturned National League of Cities v. Usery, a nine-year-old precedent that had shielded “traditional governmental functions” from federal labor regulation.7Justia. Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 469 U.S. 528 (1985) Blackmun argued that courts could not reliably define which state functions counted as “traditional” and that states should look to their representation in Congress, not judicial doctrine, for protection against federal overreach. Garcia remains central to modern federalism.
Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council (1976)
Blackmun wrote the opinion establishing First Amendment protection for commercial speech. Virginia had banned pharmacists from advertising prescription drug prices in the name of professional standards, and Blackmun rejected that justification, writing that a state cannot pursue professionalism “by keeping the public in ignorance.”8Justia. Va. Pharmacy Bd. v. Va. Consumer Council, 425 U.S. 748 (1976) States kept the authority to prohibit false, misleading, or illegal advertising and to impose reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions, but truthful commercial advertising earned constitutional protection for the first time.
Flood v. Kuhn (1972)
Flood v. Kuhn tested Major League Baseball’s exemption from federal antitrust law, which underpinned the reserve clause binding players to their teams. The Court ruled 5–3 that the exemption stood. Blackmun acknowledged the exemption was an “aberration” inconsistent with how the Court treated every other professional sport, but concluded that overturning it was a job for Congress.9Justia. Flood v. Kuhn, 407 U.S. 258 (1972) The opinion is remembered less for its legal reasoning than for its opening section, a lengthy, affectionate recitation of baseball history that lists dozens of legendary players by name.
Dissents That Defined His Later Years
DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989)
DeShaney involved a four-year-old boy, Joshua DeShaney, repeatedly beaten by his father until he suffered permanent brain damage. County social workers had received multiple reports and documented injuries but never removed Joshua from the home. The majority held that the Due Process Clause does not require government to protect individuals from harm inflicted by private parties.
Blackmun’s dissent accused the majority of “sterile formalism” and closed with a passage that became famous: “Poor Joshua! Victim of repeated attacks by an irresponsible, bullying, cowardly, and intemperate father, and abandoned by respondents who placed him in a dangerous predicament and who knew or learned what was going on, and yet did essentially nothing.”10Legal Information Institute. DeShaney v. Winnebago County, 489 U.S. 189 (1989) The methodical tax lawyer who arrived in 1970 would not have written those words.
Bowers v. Hardwick (1986)
The majority in Bowers upheld a Georgia law criminalizing sodomy as applied to consensual sexual conduct between adults. Blackmun dissented sharply, rejecting the majority’s framing of the case as being about a “fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy.” The real question, he wrote, concerned “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men, namely, the right to be let alone.”11Justia. Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986) In 2003, Lawrence v. Texas explicitly overruled Bowers and cited Blackmun’s dissent approvingly.
Callins v. Collins (1994)
In February 1994, the Court declined to hear Callins v. Collins, a Texas death penalty case. Blackmun dissented from the denial of certiorari with a statement that amounted to a personal renunciation of capital punishment: “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.”12Legal Information Institute. Callins v. Collins, 510 U.S. 1141 (1994) He had spent more than twenty years trying to develop rules that would make the death penalty fair and consistent, and had voted to uphold death sentences many times. His conclusion that the system could not be fixed came from accumulated experience rather than any shift in abstract principle.
The Blackmun Papers and Final Years
Before his death, Blackmun arranged for his personal papers to be deposited at the Library of Congress and opened to the public. The collection is one of the most detailed records of Supreme Court deliberation ever released, including handwritten notes from private conferences, internal memoranda circulated between chambers during opinion drafting, and the circulation sheets Blackmun used to track which justices had signed onto which drafts. The papers remain an essential resource for understanding how the Court functioned during the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Blackmun announced his retirement on April 6, 1994, at age eighty-five. President Bill Clinton nominated Stephen Breyer to succeed him.13Congress.gov. Nomination of Stephen G. Breyer for Supreme Court In retirement, Blackmun stayed connected to the Court and made a cameo as Justice Joseph Story in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film Amistad. He died on March 5, 1999, at age ninety, from complications after hip replacement surgery.
His legacy remains tied to Roe v. Wade, which defined his public identity and was overruled nearly three decades after he left the bench. But his contributions extended well beyond abortion law: he established constitutional protection for commercial speech, expanded federal labor standards over state governments, and produced dissents in DeShaney, Bowers, and Callins that outlived their losing votes. The arc from cautious Nixon appointee to impassioned defender of individual rights is one of the most striking personal transformations in the Court’s history.