Harry Blackmun: Dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick

About the Author

Harry Andrew Blackmun was the ninety-ninth justice appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was appointed by President Richard M. Nixon and sat on the Court from 1970 until 1994. Raised in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Blackmun attended Harvard University on partial scholarship, graduating with a degree in mathematics. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he returned to Minnesota, where he clerked for Judge John Benjamin Sanborn of the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals. He later worked for the firm of Driscoll, Fletcher, Dorsey, and Barker in Minneapolis, practicing tax law and becoming a junior partner in 1939. In 1950 he accepted the position of resident counsel at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and in 1959 he was appointed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Blackmun was a childhood friend of Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative jurist who was already sitting on the Supreme Court when Blackmun was appointed. They were immediately dubbed the “Minnesota Twins” by the press. However, it soon became apparent that Blackmun was not voting in lockstep with the chief justice. Their relationship later deteriorated.

Blackmun is best known for the majority opinion he wrote in the seminal case Roe v. Wade, which struck down state laws criminalizing abortion. Although six justices joined him in the opinion, he has always been personally associated with the ruling and was the target of protests and even death threats for the remainder of his life. Over the course of his tenure, he filed several dissenting opinions defending Roe and lamenting that later decisions by the Court essentially rendered moot the rights recognized in Roe. His dissents in the abortion cases as well as other civil rights cases often urged the Court to remember the “little people” and the world “out there.” Blackmun is also remembered for a dissent he filed in a death-penalty case a few months before retiring from the Court in 1994. The dissent stated his conviction that capital punishment was abhorrent as well as unconstitutional.