The New York Times opens a window into the very private world of a United States Supreme Court Justice. Justice Harry Blackmun’s private papers are going public.
Linda Greenhouse writes (excerpt):
It was a remarkable evolution, the outline of which is apparent from the official record of votes and opinions in the thousands of cases that came before the court during his 24-year tenure. But Justice Blackmun left behind much more. He had collected more than a half-million letters, notes, memos and journals that provide a fuller portrait of him and offer insights into the life of the court during the last quarter of the 20th century.
After retiring in 1994, he gave the papers to the Library of Congress on the condition that they remain closed for five years after his death, a restriction that expires Thursday. That unusually short period allows the public to learn his views of colleagues still on the bench, something justices do not often permit. The New York Times got an advance look at the documents.
They disclose behind-the-scenes shifts during decision-making and the origins of important rulings, including Roe v. Wade. The papers show the disarray of the Burger court and the relative calm of the Rehnquist court. They also tell a very human story: how the long friendship between Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun could not survive the cauldron of their joint service on the nation’s highest court.
And they help explain one man’s journey. Justice Blackmun did not simply stand still while the court around him became more conservative. His movement across the court’s spectrum was not just relative, but absolute; while the court went in one direction, he went in another.
A dissenter from the court’s 1972 decision that struck down all existing death penalty laws, he ended his career in 1994 with a ringing denunciation of capital punishment that left him as the court’s sole categorical dissenter on the issue. His papers contain the record of a painful episode in his pre-Supreme Court judicial career, when he yielded to collegial pressure and withdrew remarks indicating his personal opposition to the death penalty.
His regret was lasting; his parting statement on the issue — “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death” — may have been a long-delayed expiation.
At first a skeptical bystander while the court wrestled with whether to expand constitutional protection for women’s rights — in his private notes, he disparaged a brief filed in a sex discrimination case by Prof. Ruth Bader Ginsburg as “filled with emotion” — he eventually enlisted in the cause and expressed the hope that his work had contributed to “the progress of the emancipation of women.”