HARRY A. BLACKMUN SERVED ON THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT for almost a quarter of a century, beginning in 1970 after his selection by President Richard Nixon and ending in 1994 with his retirement at age 85. When Blackmun's papers were opened to public inspection in March 2004, five years after his death, laudatory news stories highlighted his evolution toward a more compassionate jurisprudence. Those accounts contrasted sharply with coverage at the outset of Blackmun's Supreme Court career, when critics dismissed him as Chief Justice Warren Burger's "Minnesota Twin," made fun of his excessive interest in trivia, and viewed his early record on the court as anything but sensitive to society's least fortunate. Yet a far more troubling story emerges from the pages of Blackmun's papers, one that remains almost wholly unreported.
It is the story of a justice who ceded to his law clerks much greater control over his official work than did any of the other 15 justices from the last half-century whose papers are publicly available. Whether any current justices are similarly abdicating their responsibilities will not be known until their case files are opened in the future.
Blackmun's clerks played substantial roles in producing his opinions as early as 1971, when the landmark abortion cases Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton first came before the court. But Blackmun's comments and case files show his clerks' involvement in his work increasing substantially during the 1980s and early 1990s. In Blackmun's final term of 1993-94, his clerks were almost wholly responsible for his famous denunciation of capital punishment in his dissent in Callins v. Collins.
This degree of clerk involvement is indefensible...
Link
It looks like Blackmun was a front man for law clerks two or three years out of Harvard where arguments aren't between left and right but between the left and far left.
It is the story of a justice who ceded to his law clerks much greater control over his official work than did any of the other 15 justices from the last half-century whose papers are publicly available. Whether any current justices are similarly abdicating their responsibilities will not be known until their case files are opened in the future.
Blackmun's clerks played substantial roles in producing his opinions as early as 1971, when the landmark abortion cases Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton first came before the court. But Blackmun's comments and case files show his clerks' involvement in his work increasing substantially during the 1980s and early 1990s. In Blackmun's final term of 1993-94, his clerks were almost wholly responsible for his famous denunciation of capital punishment in his dissent in Callins v. Collins.
This degree of clerk involvement is indefensible...
Link
It looks like Blackmun was a front man for law clerks two or three years out of Harvard where arguments aren't between left and right but between the left and far left.
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