Law Prof Disputes Report of Blackmun Insensitivity in Opinion Draft
A law professor is disputing a report in The Brethren that Justice Harry Blackmun failed to list black baseball players in his initial draft of an opinion in a baseball antitrust case.
George Mason law professor Ross Davies says he delved into Blackmun’s archives and there is no early draft without a listing of players Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, Legal Times reports. The Brethren claims Blackmun added those athletes to the 1972 opinion’s list of baseball’s best players at the suggestion of Justice Thurgood Marshall.
The list of players was in the opening paragraphs of Blackmun’s opinion. The recitation of baseball history was “so sappy that two justices in the majority refused to join that section of the decision,” the Legal Times story says.
Davies came to his conclusion after tracking all the case drafts and annotations in Blackmun’s archives regarding the decision, Flood v. Kuhn. Davies makes his case in an article of the Journal of Supreme Court History. He also is editor of the Green Bag law review.
One of the authors of The Brethren, Scott Armstrong, told Legal Times that he stands by the account for now, but he has not had time to check his book files for more information.
Brad Snyder, who wrote a book about the case, says Blackmun had denied the report in The Brethren.
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