Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun stepped down from the high court in 1994. He died in 1999, forever remembered as the justice who wrote the majority decision in the landmark 1973 abortion rights case, Roe v. Wade.
In her new book, “Becoming Justice Blackmun,” Pulitzer Prize winner Linda Greenhouse tells the intimate unlikely story of Justice Blackmun’s evolution on the bench, and of the Supreme Court he helped shape.
Nominated to the court by Richard Nixon in 1970, Blackmun was not a judicial radical. Born in working-class St. Paul, he worked his way through Harvard Law School and was boyhood friends with the Court’s then-Chief Justice Warren Burger.
Hear a conversation with Greenhouse about the saga of Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun.
Guests:
Linda Greenhouse, Pulitzer Prize-winning Supreme Court Reporter for the New York Times and author of the new book, “Becoming Justice Blackmun”
Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst.
