Harry Blackmun - Early Years and Professional Career

Early Years and Professional Career

Harry Blackmun was born in Nashville, Illinois, and grew up in Dayton's Bluff, a working-class neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He attended the same grade school as future Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, with whom he eventually served on the Supreme Court for some sixteen years. He attended Harvard College on scholarship, earning an A.B. summa cum laude in mathematics and graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1929. While at Harvard, Blackmun joined Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity and sang with the Harvard Glee Club (with whom he performed for President Herbert Hoover in 1929, Blackmun's first visit to Washington). He attended Harvard Law School (among his professors there was Felix Frankfurter), graduating in 1932. He served in a variety of positions including private counsel, law clerk, and adjunct faculty at the University of Minnesota Law School and William Mitchell College of Law (then the St. Paul College of Law). Blackmun's practice as an attorney at the law firm now known as Dorsey & Whitney focused in its early years on taxation, trusts and estates, and civil litigation. He married Dorothy Clark in 1941 and had three daughters with her, Nancy, Sally, and Susan. Between 1950 and 1959, Blackmun served as resident counsel for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He would later describe his time at Mayo as "his happiest time" (while describing his later work on the judiciary as where he "performed his duty").

In the late 1950s, Blackmun's close friend Warren E. Burger, then an appellate judge on the D.C. Circuit, repeatedly encouraged Blackmun to seek a judgeship. Judge John B. Sanborn, Jr. of the Eighth Circuit, who Blackmun had clerked for after graduating from Harvard, told Blackmun of his plans to assume senior status. He said that he would suggest Blackmun's name to the Eisenhower administration if Blackmun wished to succeed him. After much urging by Sanborn and Burger, Blackmun agreed to accept the nomination, duly offered by Eisenhower and members of the Justice Department. The American Bar Association gave him an extremely high rating of "exceptionally well qualified," and he was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate on September 15, 1959. Over the next decade, Blackmun would author 217 opinions for the Eighth Circuit.