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Yes I know, the competition for the title of Worst Supreme Court Justice Ever is stiff. A decent rogue’s gallery of candidates might include , for example, the likes of William O. Douglas, Earl Warren, and William Brennan. There may be a good case to be made for any of those, and plenty more. But none of them has the distinction of having authored Roe v. Wade. So for today, permit me to make the case for Blackmun. Blackmun did not author any large number of important Supreme Court decisions. One might surmise that his colleagues did not trust him...

THE BRAINS BEHIND BLACKMUN Harry Blackmun's papers reveal that, more than any justice in memory, he gave his law clerks control over his thinking and writing when he was on the Supreme Court. By David J. Garrow I 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...

Posted: October 31, 2009 By Chelsea Schilling © 2009 WorldNetDaily A pro-life movement seeking to guarantee basic human rights to unborn babies is exploding in 32 states – and leaders say it could be just the key to nullifying abortion provisions in President Obama's health-care "reform." While abortion was not specifically mentioned in earlier bills under consideration, H.R.3962, unveiled by Nancy Pelosi this week, does in fact state abortion is to be covered. Concerns are mounting that whatever the final form of the legislation, the procedure will become more accessible, requiring health insurance companies to fund abortions. Gualberto Garcia Jones...

Pro-life activists in Colorado have cleared a major hurdle in preparing an initiative for the 2008 election that would grant personhood to the unborn and create a possible confrontation to the 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling that created abortion rights. The state Supreme Court has granted permission for supporters of Colorado for Equal Rights to move forward with collecting the estimated 76,000 signatures needed to put the issue on the state election ballot. It would grant personhood to the unborn from the moment of fertilization, meaning state and local laws protecting any individual life would be applied to the unborn....

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, author of the controversial Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion in 1973, died Thursday at a Virginia hospital (...) President Clinton said Thursday he "saw up close Harry Blackmun's intense passion -- his passion for the welfare of the American people, for defending our liberties and our institutions, for moving us forward together." "In 24 years on the Supreme Court he served with compassion, distinction, and honor," Clinton said. "Every decision and every dissent was firmly grounded in the Constitution he revered and his uncanny feel for the human element that lies...

Action was brought for a declaratory and injunctive relief respecting Texas criminal abortion laws which were claimed to be unconstitutional. A three-judge United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, 314 F.Supp. 1217, entered judgment declaring laws unconstitutional and an appeal was taken. The Supreme Court, Mr. Justice Blackmun, held that the Texas criminal abortion statutes prohibiting abortions at any stage of pregnancy except to save the life of the mother are unconstitutional;

[Blackmun] believed that doctors needed to have leeway to do medically necessary abortions. … [H]e described Georgia's law [later declared unconstitutional in his own Doe v. Bolton opinion!] as "a fine statute [that] strikes a balance that is fair." Yet, a year later, Blackmun wrote an opinion for the court that struck down all of the nation's abortion laws. Equally important, his opinion made virtually all abortions legal as a matter of a constitutional right…. Last year, on the fifth anniversary of Blackmun's death, the Library of Congress opened his papers to the public. His thick files on the abortion...

As President Bush contemplates his Supreme Court nominee, one fact to keep in mind is that seven of the nine current Justices were appointed by Republican Presidents. If you want to understand why many of Mr. Bush's supporters are worried that he might nominate Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, this is the reason. The objection isn't personal, and it isn't even about what Mr. Gonzales thinks; the concern is that virtually no oneknows what he thinks. Mr. Gonzales's brief tenure on the Texas Supreme Court and his behind-closed-doors advice as chief White House counsel shed little light on what his judicial...

Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general has given a limited endorsement of Judge Harry A. Blackmun, President Nixon's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. "I've seen nothing to this point to indicate that he is not qualified," Mr. Clark said last night in a statement.

Contrast Tocqueville with Justices Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy. Blackmun wanted to create a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy because of the asserted "'moral fact' that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole." Justice Kennedy, writing for six justices, did invent that right, declaring that "At the heart of [constitutional] liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Neither of these vaporings has the remotest basis in the actual Constitution and neither has any definable meaning other than...

After the McCain mutiny -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: June 1, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 Creators Syndicate Inc. It is being called "the McCain Mutiny." On May 23, Senate Republicans were poised to disarm Harry Reid and Co. of the weapons they have used to kill the Bush judges. Every hostage still held by the Democratic minority was about to be freed. And the Senate was about to dynamite the last obstacle to President Bush's honoring of his pledge to end judicial activism. The road was about to be opened for two, three or perhaps four Supreme Court justices, who would...

Harry Blackmun's papers reveal that, more than any justice in memory, he gave his law clerks control over his thinking and writing when he was on the Supreme Court. I 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...

The late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun ceded so much of his authority to his law clerks during his 24-year tenure that it amounts to "a scandalous abdication of judicial responsibility," Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow asserts in a magazine article out today. “Will we find someday that Justice Scalia's file on Bush v. Gore reflects the same partisanship among the clerks that we see in Blackmun's files in Planned Parenthood v. Casey?" Garrow asked. "I hope we don't." It was in the (Casey v Planned Parenthood) file that some of the most stinging remarks are made by Blackmun's clerks....

The late Harry Blackmun's papers show how he's still shaping the Supreme Court today on issues like abortion. But the cases he thought he'd closed aren't closed after all. When the Library of Congress opened the late Justice Harry Blackmun's massive collection of papers for public inspection on March 4, two journalists already had been looking through the 1,600 cardboard boxes of documents for two months. Both are ardent fans of Blackmun and his most famous ruling—Roe v. Wade—and had been granted exclusive access at the Blackmun family's request. The reporters—The New York Times' Linda Greenhouse and National Public Radio's...

One October morning in Las Vegas, a teenage girl, five months pregnant, checked into Humana Sunrise Hospital to under-go a prostaglandin abortion. Prostaglandin abortion is a simple — but dangerous — procedure in which the pregnant mother is given a pill which causes her to go into labor and expel her baby. On this morning the girl's labor was slow to commence and the abortionist ordered that she be given a second pill. Editor Sherman R. Fredrick of the Las Vegas Review Journal described what happened next: "Later nurses heard a shriek, entered the room and found the girl screaming....

Photo of Tracy Marciniak of Wisconsin holding her dead son, Zachariah, at his funeral. Zachariah was killed by his father when he punched Tracy in the stomach during her ninth month of pregnancy. He was convicted for injuring Tracy but not for killing Zachariah.(Photo courtesy of National Right to Life) OPINION -- In a statement released after last week’s passage of the Unborn Victims of Violence Act by the U.S. Senate, National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy warned, "Giving a fetus at any stage of development [emphasis hers] the same legal rights as the pregnant woman will undermine...

CURRENT ISSUE | SUBSCRIBE | CHRONICLES EXTRA | AUDIO | EVENTSMarch 6, 2004 DEPLORABLE SUPREME COURT "MODERATES" March 4 should be a memorable date for Americans, but it is not—and with good reason. It was on March 4, 1789, that, by congressional enactment, the first government of the United States took office under the Constitution. Two hundred and fifteen years later to the day, American legal correspondents began commenting on the revelations of Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun whose private notes and tape-recorded memoirs were for the first time made available to the public. From the passages that have...

The late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun is most closely identified with the sweeping abortion decision Roe vs. Wade. Five years after his death, release of his personal papers illustrates his personal devotion to Roe—and the political nature of today's judiciary. He was famously modest, favored cozy cardigans, took noon strolls around the building at One First Street, and drove an old Volkswagen bug to his office in Washington. As the author of Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion, Harry A. Blackmun was also one of the most controversial Supreme Court justices in history. On March 4,...

Is this statement in the part of the case that can be referred to by defense lawyers to assist their clients? "Upholding abortion in the Casey decision, Anthony Kennedy permitted himself one of the most ludicrous lines in Supreme Court history. 'At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,' he wrote." If I read this correctly a defendant could use this as a defense for anything just by redefining existence and meaning so that what they did was not a crime....

Upholding abortion in the Casey decision, Anthony Kennedy permitted himself one of the most ludicrous lines in Supreme Court history. "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life," he wrote. Harry Blackmun's just released papers explain Kennedy's babblings: he was an eager-to-please pupil of Blackmun's. "Dear Harry," Kennedy wrote to him. "I need to see you as soon as you have a few free moments. I want to tell you about some developments in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and at least...