David Garrow on Harry Blackmun
on Apr 19, 2005 at 1:00 pm
Legal Affairs has posted David Garrow’s piece on the role of Harry Blackmun’s law clerks in his jurisprudence, as well as two responses. Garrow is harshly critical of Blackmun based on his review of the Blackmun papers, and the responses are harshly critical of Garrow (who presumably may respond in the future). Readers may also want to look at this article by Tony Mauro (subscription required), in which Garrow raises a broader question that certainly seems very worthy of discussion: “‘The real issue is not specific to Blackmun,’ said Garrow, a professor at Emory University, ‘but whether furnishing the justices with four clerks creates powerful incentives to the justices to do far less of their work than if they had only one. The debate that would be good is whether it would be better if they had just one clerk or at the most two.'”
