Justice Blackmun and the “World Out There

Abstract

Harry Blackmun fooled everyone. When Richard Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court at age sixty-one, who would have predicted that this "'safe" conservative would retire twenty-four years later-the year Nixon died-as the Court's last liberal?' Would anyone have guessed how sharply he would break from his "Minnesota Twin," Warren Burger, or brake the Burger Court's retreat from the Warren Court? Did anyone foresee that a member of so many majorities would someday emerge as the Carolene Products' Justice of the Rehnquist Court: the spokesman for the have-nots, the excluded, the discrete and insular minorities?