Word: blackmun
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...hour Prairie Home Companion, aired live from an auditorium with 1,000 seats, became an almost instantaneous hit on National Public Radio. Now heard in most parts of the country on Saturday night, it has acquired a devoted band of a million or so fans. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun is one. Says he, urging a dose of Home Companion for the power brokers: "Washington, I suspect, could use a good bit of Lake Wobegon." Like Brigadoon or Camelot-Lake Wobegon has become a symbolic landmark, existing only on the map of the imagination. "Not everything that is real...
...favor. Nonetheless, legal scholars doubt that O'Connor will become a clone of the court's leading conservative. They do not expect a pair of "Arizona twins" to develop and to hang together any more consistently than have the now-splintered "Minnesota twins," Burger and Blackmun. Broadly speaking, the court now has two liberals, Brennan and Marshall, in a standoff facing two conservatives, Rehnquist and Burger. The decisions thus often depend on how the other so-called fluid five divide on a given case. And that rarely can be foreseen...
...Blackmun, who has moved increasingly to the left, probably works harder than the other judges on his decisions, which often reflect his ad hoc, personal sense of right and wrong. The courtly Virginian, Lewis Powell, is regarded as the great balancer, in the middle on almost every case. John Paul Stevens, the most original thinker on the court, is an iconoclastic loner who likes to file separate opinions that challenge old assumptions even when his conclusions coincide with those of his brothers. Byron White, the best pure lawyer on the court, is unpredictably liberal and unpredictably conservative, but meticulously careful...
...Holmes ruled against Teddy Roosevelt in a key antitrust case, the President, who had appointed Holmes, fumed: "I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that." Said Dwight Eisenhower about his selection of Earl Warren: "The worst damn fool mistake I ever made." Harry Blackmun stunned Richard Nixon by writing the court's majority opinion in Roe vs. Wade (1973), the decision that legalized abortion...
...other states, where prisons are under court orders to improve conditions, and in an additional ten states, where similar cases are pending. The court stressed that state legislators and administrators were better suited than judges to decide how to run their penitentiaries. But, said Justices William Brennan, Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens in a concurring opinion, "today's decision should in no way be construed as a retreat from careful judicial scrutiny of prison conditions...