I can say I met Justice Blackmun. I almost lost my 9-0 perfect victory because of him. Here is what he said about my lawsuit against the SEC:
BLACKMUN, J., concurring
MR. JUSTICE BLACKMUN, concurring in the judgment.
I join the Court in its judgment, but I am less sure than the Court is that the Congress has not granted the Securities and Exchange Commission at least some power to suspend trading in a nonexempt security for successive 10-day periods despite the absence of a new set of circumstances. The Congress' awareness, recognition, and acceptance of the Commission's practice, see ante at 119-120, nn. 9 and 10, at the time of the 1964 amendments, blunts, it seems to me, the original literal language of the statute. The 1975 Report of the Senate [436 U.S. 127] Banking Committee, stating that the Commission was "expected to use" § 12(j)'s amended suspension of registration provision "in cases of extended duration," ante at 122, certainly demands new circumspection of the Commission, but I do not believe it wholly extinguished Congress' acceptance of restrained use of successive 10-day suspensions when an emergency situation is presented, as for instance, where the Commission is unable adequately to inform the public of the existence of a suspected market manipulation within a single 10-day period. Section 12(j)'s suspension remedy provides no aid when a nonissuer has violated the securities law, or where the security involved is not registered, or in the interim period before notice and an opportunity for a hearing can be provided and a formal finding of misconduct made on the record.
Here, the Commission indulged in 37 suspension orders, all but the last issued "quite bare of any emergency findings," to borrow Professor Loss' phrase. Beyond the opaque suggestion in an April, 1975, Release, No. 11,383, that the Commission was awaiting the "dissemination of information concerning regulatory action by Canadian authorities," shareholders of CJL were given no hint why their securities were to be made nonnegotiable for over a year. Until April 22, 1976, see Release No. 12,361, the SEC provided no opportunity to shareholders to dispute the factual premises of a suspension, and, in the absence of any explanation by the Commission of the basis for its suspension orders, such a right to comment would be useless. As such, I conclude that the use of suspension orders in this case exceeded the limits of the Commission's discretion. Given the 1975 amendments, a year-long blockade of trading without reasoned explanation of the supposed emergency or opportunity for an interim hearing clearly exceeds Congress' intention.
Advocates said "Blackmun is Beautiful" because he was conservative and, unlike the notoriously mediocre G. Harrold Carswell of Tallahassee, Fla, also had judicial qualifications.
(A famous quote by Senator Roman Huskra in support of Nixon's nomination of Carswell was "There are millions of mediocre Americans, and they, too, deserve to be represented in the United States Supreme Court!" Carswell was defeated nevertheless and Blackmun nominated in his place.)
Critics including myself were proven wrong when Blackmun made such strong conservative decisions as legalizing abortion. (True conservatives, which include myself, are in favor of allowing privacy rights to women and are against governmental interference in private affairs.)
Sam Sloan
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Retired Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, author of the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide and set off one of the most explosive political debates in American history, died today at age 90.
Blackmun served 24 years on the nation's highest court after being appointed in 1970 by President Richard M. Nixon. He retired in 1994.
Blackmun died at Arlington Hospital in suburban Arlington, Va., from complications following hip-replacement surgery performed nine days ago. He had fallen and broken his hip at home a day before the operation.
The lifelong Republican was considered a staunch conservative in his early days on the court. By the time he retired, he was considered its most liberal justice, but he has told friends the court's politics had changed more than his own.
Blackmun often cast liberal votes in cases pitting individual liberties against governmental authority. But he generally voted against expanding the rights of criminal suspects.
He was a champion of maintaining a strict separation between church and state,
But towering above all else in Blackmun's high court tenure was his role in the 1973 decision and subsequent abortion rulings.
His authorship of Roe vs. Wade made him the most vilified Supreme Court member in history. He received more than 60,000 pieces of "hate mail" because of the decision.
The letters called him a murderer and a butcher. They compared him to the Nazi overseers of genocide.
Blackmun insisted on reading all such mail. "I want to know what the people who wrote are thinking," he once said.
In a 1983 interview with The Associated Press on the eve of his most famous decision's 10-year anniversary, Blackmun repeated the phrase "author of the abortion decision" slowly and softly. ``We all pick up tabs," he said. "I'll carry this one to my grave."
After years of stopping just short of reversing Roe vs. Wade, the court in 1992 reaffirmed, by a 5-4 vote, the 1973 ruling's central holding -- that women have a constitutional right to end their pregnancies.
A triumphant Blackmun wrote that the victory was good law only as long as the current court was intact. But President Clinton's election and Justice Byron R. White's decision to retire before Blackmun lessened the anticipated impact Blackmun's departure would have on legalized abortion.
When appointing Blackmun, Nixon called him a "strict constructionist," a term defined by Nixon aides as a judge who leaned toward interpreting existing law rather than making new law.
Blackmun was Nixon's third choice to fill the vacancy created when Justice Abe Fortas resigned under fire for having accepted a $20,000 fee from the family of a financier who went to prison.
The Senate rejected Nixon's nominations of two federal appeals court judges, Clement Haynsworth of Greenville, S.C., and G. Harrold Carswell of Tallahassee, Fla.
Blackmun, who had been a member of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since 1959, was confirmed by a unanimous Senate vote.
In his early years on the high court, Blackmun was derided for what legal scholars perceived as his dependence on fellow Minnesotan and longtime friend Warren E. Burger, the chief justice who had been appointed by Nixon a year earlier.
Blackmun was called ``Hip Pocket Harry" and ``The Minnesota Twin" in print.
But by the end of his first decade on the court, Blackmun had established himself as an independent force whose vote often was a critical one in close cases.
Blackmun also emerged in a new role -- the justice most intent on forcing the court to come to grips with the realities of the problems it was asked to resolve and with the real-world effects of those resolutions.
His opinions often portrayed those realities with passionate rhetoric.
When the court in 1993 ruled that U.S. authorities need not give hearings before seizing and returning Haitians who had fled their homeland by boats, Blackmun was the lone dissenter.
``They demand only that the United States, land of refugees and guardian of freedom, cease forcibly driving them back to detention, abuse and death," he wrote. ``That is a modest plea ... We should not close our ears to it."
When the court in 1989 disallowed a battered boy's lawsuit against the child-custody officials who placed him with his abusive father, Blackmun again dissented. ``Poor Joshua," he wrote. ``Victim of repeated attacks by an irresponsible, bullying, cowardly and intemperate father and abandoned by (officials) who placed him in a dangerous situation."
Months before his retirement, Blackmun repudiated his career-long acceptance of capital punishment and declared himself opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances.
``The death-penalty experiment has failed. I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death," Blackmun wrote.
He wrote for the court when it ruled in 1985 that Congress has almost unlimited power to force state and local governments to comply with federal laws -- including those requiring overtime pay for more than 40-hour work weeks.
Blackmun also wrote the 1991 decision that said employers may not bar women from certain hazardous jobs just to protect fetuses. A 1984 opinion he wrote required states to offer ``clear and convincing" evidence of parental unfitness before permanently severing all parent-child ties.
In a 1977 decision, Blackmun wrote for the court that a blanket ban on lawyer advertisements violated free-speech rights.
Blackmun was born in Nashville, Ill., but was raised in St. Paul and Minneapolis. He and Burger first met as kindergarten pupils.
Their friendship was long lasting, and Blackmun served as best man in Burger's 1933 wedding. But on the high court, differences between the two jurists strained those boyhood ties.
Blackmun won a scholarship to Harvard, where he earned highest honors as a mathematics major. He then went to Harvard's law school.
After practicing law in the Twin Cities for nearly 20 years, Blackmun served as general counsel of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., from 1950 to 1959. President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that year.
Blackmun is survived by his wife, Dorothy, and three daughters.