Word: blackmun
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...border-patrol officers may not randomly stop cars away from border checkpoints to search for illegal aliens. If such cases did not add up to a banner year of decision making, court watchers were nonetheless fascinated by a potentially important change within the court: the continuing emergence of Harry Blackmun, 66, from the shadow of Chief Justice Warren Burger and the resultant cracks in the so-called Nixon bloc...
Friends from boyhood days back in St. Paul, Burger and Blackmun were quickly dubbed the court's Minnesota Twins. Blackmun's elevation to the court from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals was prompted by Burger's endorsement, and in Blackmun's first term the two differed on only 10% of the cases. They have never again been so much in accord, but a key split took place last July after the Chief wrote a draft of the court's unanimous opinion in U.S. v. Nixon, the explosive Executive privilege case. Most of the Justices...
During the current term, Burger and Blackmun disagreed 20% of the time. More important, Blackmun's opinions reflected a somewhat surer sense of his role as a Supreme Court Justice, and even occasionally a more liberal bent. In two cases involving antitrust law and criminal procedure, his vote tipped the result 5 to 4 against the conservatives. In a First Amendment case, Burger may have been following Blackmun. The junior Minnesotan expanded the free-speech protection of advertisements and cited with approval a dissent from an opinion he himself had written only a year earlier. Once its slowest writer...
...Harry A. Blackmun, LL.D., Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. You have distinguished yourself through your construction of the Constitution in light of our nation's current problems...
Last week the court reported that it was unable to come to a decision. With Harry Blackmun disqualifying himself, the remaining eight Justices split 4-4, a vote that left standing the decision of a lower court. That decision by the U.S. Court of Claims had been in favor of the Government copiers; it had rejected the findings of one of its commissioners, who had decided for Williams & Wilkins (TIME...