Make 'em bobble!

The Annotated Bobblehead Justice Harry A. Blackmun

A Minnesota Twins fan (thus the colors of his cap), Justice Blackmun referred to himself as "old number three" because he was President Richard Nixon's third choice - after Judges Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell, both of whom were rejected by the Senate - to replace Justice Abe Fortas on the Supreme Court.

Justice Blackmun's opinion in the Court's most recent baseball antitrust case, Flood v. Kuhn, 407 U.S. 258 (1972), famously features a list of "many names, celebrated for one reason or another, that have sparked the diamond and its environs." When confronted with his failure to include New York Giants great Mel Ott on the list, Blackmun reportedly exclaimed, "I will never forgive myself!" To commemorate the oversight, some of his clerks gave him a genuine Louisville Slugger® "Mel Ott" bat.

No one in the history of the Supreme Court is more thoroughly associated with a single decision than is Justice Blackmun with Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

In a not-so-boring tax case, Justice Blackmun spoke for the Court in Portland Golf Club v. CIR, 497 U.S. 154 (1990), holding that under I.R.C. § 512, "any losses incurred as a result of petitioner's nonmember sales may be offset against its investment income only if the nonmember sales were undertaken with an intent to profit."

Harry A. Blackmun, 1970-1994

Harry Blackmun was born in 1908 in Nashville, Illinois, and grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. Blackmun's father owned a grocery and hardware store, his mother was a musician and one of his close friends growing up was Warren Burger. He was later best man at Burger's wedding and a colleague on the Supreme Court. He majored in mathematics at Harvard and graduated summa cum laude in 1929. He received his LL.B. from Harvard Law School in 1932 where he had Felix Frankfurter for a professor. He clerked for the U.S. circuit court, practiced privately, and was the first resident counsel for the Mayo Clinic before being appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1959. He was President Nixon's third choice to fill Abe Fortas's seat. Naming himself "Old No. 3," Blackmun was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 1970.