Roe v. Wade

About the Author

Roe v. Wade was the defining case of Associate Justice Harry Blackmun’s twenty-four-year career on the Supreme Court, which stretched from 1970 to 1994. When President Richard Nixon nominated Blackmun for the Court in April 1970, following the Senate rejection of two southern conservative nominees, Blackmun seemed poised to adhere to conventional Republican principles. He and Chief Justice Warren Burger were friends, and newspapers dubbed them the “Minnesota twins” because of their shared history in the state. As Blackmun’s career progressed, however, particularly after the Roe decision, his opinions drifted toward the Court’s liberal side, as he often sided with Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall in finding constitutional protection for individual rights.

Born in Illinois on November 12, 1908, and reared in Minnesota, Blackmun was a 1932 graduate of Harvard Law School. He married Dorothy Clark in 1941 and fathered three daughters. Perhaps the most influential phase of his career before he sat on the federal bench was his service as resident counsel for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, from 1950 to 1959. That pioneering era for heart surgery exhilarated Blackmun and inspired in him an almost reverential respect for physicians. After joining the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upon President Dwight Eisenhower’s nomination, he continued to serve on the board of directors of the Rochester Methodist Hospital until ascending to the Supreme Court. He would later state that if he had had the chance to pursue his career over again, he would have become a physician. In the summer of 1972, he did much of his work on the Roe opinion from the Mayo Clinic’s library.

Blackmun’s interest in the practice of medicine resonates throughout the Roe opinion, particularly in his examination of the Hippocratic oath and in his footnote citation of medical texts such as Arturo Castiglioni’s History of Medicine. Blackmun’s opinion reflected the Court’s 7–2 majority ruling, with Justices Burger, Brennan, William Douglas, Marshall, Lewis Powell, and Potter Stewart joining and with Justices Byron White and William Rehnquist dissenting. After Roe, Blackmun received a flood of public response and letters, including some death threats.

Another significant issue addressed by Blackmun during his Supreme Court career was the death penalty. Although he often voted to uphold capital punishment in his early cases, he reversed himself shortly before his retirement in a dissenting opinion in 1994’s Callins v. Collins, declaring the death penalty unconstitutional in all circumstances. At the time of his retirement from the Court in 1994, he was considered one of the Court’s most liberal justices. Blackmun died on March 4, 1999, following complications from hip surgery.

As chief justice of the United States, William Hubbs Rehnquist oversaw the Supreme Court’s profound shift in a conservative direction after the more liberal leadership of his predecessor, Warren Burger. Rehnquist was born on October 1, 1924, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces from 1943 to 1946, he attended Stanford University in California, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science. After two years at Harvard University, where he earned a second master’s degree in government in 1950, he returned to Stanford to attend law school. There he graduated first in his class in 1952; one of his classmates was his future Supreme Court colleague Sandra Day O’Connor.

After serving as a judicial clerk for Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson during the Court’s 1952–1953 term, Rehnquist settled in Phoenix, Arizona, where he worked at a law firm and became active in Republican Party politics. From 1969 to 1971 he was assistant attorney general in the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. In 1971 President Richard Nixon nominated him for a seat on the Supreme Court; after confirmation by the Senate, Rehnquist assumed his seat in 1972. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the position of chief justice, a position he held, despite ill health in his later years, until his death on September 3, 2005.

As a member of the nation’s highest court, Rehnquist wrote primarily decisions in which he explained the legal principles and reasoning that had led to the decision. This type of legal writing requires the justice to outline the facts of the case, cite statutes and legal precedents (previous court decisions) that have a bearing on the case, and then demonstrate how those statutes and precedents should be used to decide the case at hand. Typically, when the Supreme Court arrives at a decision, the chief justice assigns the task of writing the Court’s decision to one of the justices who joined the majority, though the chief justice has often reserved that task for himself. In the case of such key Court decisions as United States v. Lopez and George W. Bush et al. v. Albert Gore, Jr., et al., Rehnquist himself wrote the decisions. Often, however, justices who do not join with the majority and disagree with the Court’s decision file a dissent outlining the basis of their disagreement. In the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision, Rehnquist disagreed with the majority and wrote such a dissent.