Becoming Justice Blackmun

"This is another book that I chose because it tells us a lot about the court today. In researching the biography Linda went through 1,600 boxes of Blackmun’s papers, 1970 to 1994. Blackmun most famously was the author of Roe v Wade , and this book in some ways is an exploration of how the casecame to define him. He spent the rest of his life being either feted or tarred-and-feathered, even though he only wrote it for the majority. This biography shows that the justices are in touch with what the public thinks. Blackmun was affected by his fan and hate mail. Blackmun is a fantastically interesting character. He and Warren Burger were meant to be the “Minnesota Twins”. They were best friends, but their friendship disintegrated on the court. His story highlights something that puzzles Americans – the tendency for conservative justices to drift to the left. There are far fewer examples of liberal justices drifting to the right. Blackmun was supposed to be a conservative jurist, but over the course of his career he became the strongest voice for upholding Roe . Originally, he voted to support the reinstitution of capital punishment in state courts across the land. But years of confronting a legal system unable to fairly prosecute and sentence criminal defendants forced Blackmun to face the fact that the system could not operate in a just manner. In 1994, Blackmun renounced support for the death penalty, famously writing “from this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death”. Some of the answer is that he was responding to criticism. There’s an amazing Blackmun quote that I’ve been thinking of all week, as the US was roiled by the execution in [the state of] Georgia of Troy Davis after seven of the nine witnesses against him recanted their testimony. There’s at least a claim that he was factually innocent. The whole country, if not the world, has gone completely bonkers trying to make sense of the death penalty in America. Years ago Blackmun wrote, “There is a world ‘out there’, the existence of which the Court, I suspect, either chooses to ignore or fears to recognise… This is a sad day for those who regard the Constitution as a force that would serve justice to all evenhandedly.” When justices join the court they can close themselves off or they can find a conduit to what Blackmun called “the world out there”. Several justices on this current Supreme Court have made cracks about how they don’t bother reading law reviews or the amicus briefs [information volunteered by someone not a party to a case] anymore. Several of them brag about not reading the newspaper. Some are ambivalent about whether porousness is good for the court or whether it’s best for justices to remain cloistered. Blackmun stands as an example of someone who paid attention to the world out there. Who said: I thought we could fix the death penalty, we tried to fix the death penalty, we haven’t fixed it at all, I changed my mind, I’m not doing it anymore. Blackmun had the willingness to see and say that he was wrong, and that his mind changed over time. He is a really interesting contrast to someone like [Justice Antonin] Scalia, who hasn’t moved at all."