Word: blackmun
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...Blackmun began as a Justice who blithely upheld a $50 fee for poor people filing for bankruptcy, since all it took was giving up movies and cigarettes for a week. But as in baseball, where he passionately rooted for the hapless Chicago Cubs along with his hometown Minnesota Twins, he came to defend the underdogs in life: blacks, women, gays, aliens, Native Americans. By 1977, in a dissent from the majority's denial of funds for Medicaid abortions, he was aware of " 'another world' out there, the existence of which the Court, I suspect, either chooses to ignore or fears...
...Blackmun may have pleasantly surprised those who worried that he would be a Burger clone, but his move to the left made him perhaps the most vilified Justice in history. Although he would wish to be known for more, Blackmun will largely be remembered for writing the 1973 majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, establishing a woman's right to choose an abortion. He probably set a record for judicial hate mail, 60,000 pieces, calling him everything from the Butcher of Dachau to Pontius Pilate. At a recent speech, he read from one: " 'You are the lowest scum...
Even before Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun announced his retirement last week, Bill Clinton was thinking about who would replace him. Not long after the start of the court's present term in October, Blackmun confided to the President that it would probably be his last. For those who did not get advance word, the imminent departure of the 85-year-old Justice was predictable from his passionate dissent on a death-penalty case in February. When he declared his categorical opposition to "the machinery of death," it was in the valedictory tone of a man writing with...
...With Blackmun's departure, the court loses the man who is by most measures its most liberal member. And by one measure, as the author of the abortion- rights ruling, Roe v. Wade, also its most controversial one. The President has promised that any of his Supreme Court appointees will support abortion rights, but Clinton shows no inclination to provoke Republicans by appointing a red-hot liberal such as Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. A room- temperature nominee is more what he has in mind for a court where power frequently rests with four or five moderate conservatives...
Whoever follows Blackmun will find a court in which the sharp divisions of 10 years ago have subsided for now and the ideological direction is hard to discern. The centrist bloc that has emerged includes Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, David Souter and probably the most recent new Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She is almost certainly a supporter of abortion rights. Since she replaced Byron White, an opponent, the court majority to uphold Roe v. Wade appears secure...