Top justices ‘like scorpions’

Press, 28 July 1986, Page 8

Top justices ‘like scorpions’

NZPA-AP Minneapolis A United States Supreme Court Justice, Harry Blackmun, has said that the Court’s last term was the most difficult of the 16 years he had served on the panel. “The Court is getting older, a little more shorttempered. When we get to abortion, sodomy in the home, religion cases, patience is thin,” he told the Eighth Circuit Judicial Conference. Mr Justice Blackmun emphasised that his comments were personal and not those of the Court.

“The nine justices began squabbling from the start of the term last September and acted like nine scorpions in a bottle.”

The Judge, who Wrote the famous decision

legalising abortion, in 1973, dissented sharply from a recent ruling upholding a Georgia law outlawing sodomy between consenting adults in the privacy of their homes. The majority opinion was outrageous, he said. His remarks were part of a review of the Supreme Court’s work, which he gives each year to judges of the Eighth United States Circuit Court of Appeals. Over the years his reviews have acquired a reputation for openness about the Court’s workings that is unusual among Supreme Court justices.

Mr Justice Blackmun served as an Eighth Circuit judge from 1959 until 1970, when he was appointed to the Supreme Court.