(1908–99). U.S. jurist Harry Blackmun served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1970 to 1994. He was best known as the author of the court’s majority decision in Roe vs. Wade, the landmark case in which a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy was guaranteed under the constitutional right to privacy.
Harry Andrew Blackmun was born on Nov. 12, 1908, in Nashville, Ill. He graduated in mathematics from Harvard University in 1929 and received his law degree from that institution in 1932. He joined a Minneapolis, Minn., law firm in 1934, and while advancing to general partner in the firm he also taught at the St. Paul College of Law from 1935 to 1941. In 1950 he became resident counsel for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. He held that post until 1959, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals.
In 1970, after two of his previous nominees had been rejected by the Senate as unqualified, President Richard M. Nixon named Blackmun to the Supreme Court. The Senate unanimously confirmed the appointment. On the court Blackmun joined his close friend from childhood, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. He was expected to vote as a conservative constitutionalist, and for the first few years of his judgeship he did just that, voting in line with court conservatives.
In 1973, however, Blackmun wrote the court’s majority decision in Roe vs. Wade. While the decision cannot be construed as legally conservative, in that the case made law in an area (abortion rights) in which the Supreme Court had rarely before issued an opinion, it can be seen as politically conservative, in that it followed from Blackmun’s deeply held belief in a citizen’s right to privacy without governmental interference. Although there were six justices who joined with Blackmun in the majority opinion, Blackmun was linked with and characterized by that case for the rest of his career.
Blackmun frequently argued that U.S. citizens have a fundamental right “to be left alone” by their government, and while Blackmun’s opinions rarely expanded the legal rights of those accused of criminal acts, they did provide an increased right to privacy on the part of ordinary citizens. Blackmun was also a staunch supporter of the First Amendment to the Constitution, of the strong separation of church and state, and of affirmative action. At the end of his legal career, Blackmun shifted his opinion on the constitutionality of the death penalty because of his growing belief that the death penalty was applied in an inherently random and arbitrary fashion. He retired from the bench in 1994 and died on March 4, 1999, in Arlington, Va.