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The papers of Supreme Court Associate Justice Harry A. Blackmun (1908-1999) were opened to the public on March 4, 2004. Although Blackmun wrote many well-known decisions for the court, his most famous decision is the one he penned for the majority in Roe v. Wade, which stated that the 14th Amendment's right to privacy included a woman's right to an abortion. |
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Blackmun was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1970 by President Richard Nixon, and he served until his retirement in 1994 at the age of 85. In May 1997, Blackmun gave his papers to the Library of Congress, where they joined the papers of 38 other justices and chief justices of the court, including those of John Marshall, Roger B. Taney, Charles Evans Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren and Hugo Black. At the time of his gift, Blackmun stipulated that the papers should not be opened to the general public until five years after his death; he died in Arlington, Va., on March 4, 1999. Blackmun was a contemporary, for varying amounts of time, of seven of the current associate justices who sit on the Supreme Court: John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. |
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