Sixteen months ago, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun found himself in a room with an enviable audience of one: President-elect Bill Clinton.
Blackmun used the occasion, a New Year's 1993 meeting at Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head, S.C., to tell Clinton of his personal opposition to the death penalty, and of his hope that Clinton would take the job of picking Supreme Court justices and other federal judges seriously.
"I asked him not to use a litmus test," Blackmun recalled later, "but to get just good judges, judges of experience, judgment, honor, and above all integrity of the highest order."
At the next Renaissance Weekend, four months ago, Blackmun cornered Clinton again, this time to say he would be retiring soon.
Blackmun announced his decision Wednesday, and now the question is whether Clinton will follow the justice's earlier advice about choosing a replacement.
Whether the president's nominee runs into confirmation trouble may depend on whether a perceived "litmus test" is used on hot-button issues like abortion and capital punishment.
Abortion-rights supporters are urging Clinton to name someone with as much passion for abortion rights as Blackmun has displayed.
On the death-penalty issue, Clinton told USA TODAY last month: "I think it's something I would take into consideration, but I'm very leery of litmus tests."
Clinton, unlike Blackmun, supports capital punishment: "It is a weapon we ought to keep in our arsenal as a society," Clinton said last month.
Blackmun, in what now appears to have been a valedictory, wrote in a Feb. 22 dissent, "I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed."
Death penalty opponents are disappointed that a new champion of their cause is leaving the court.
"The way for President Clinton to honor Justice Blackmun's legacy is to appoint someone who is open-minded and fair on the issue," said Leigh Dingerson of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
But more than any single issue, Blackmun's legacy may be his people-oriented approach to cases.
"Those of us who have studied the law can at times be lost in its abstractions," Clinton said Wednesday. "In cases argued before him, (Blackmun) found the human dimension and struck the right balance."
That search for the human dimension led Blackmun to side with women, minorities and homosexuals seeking equal rights, but he also was a relative hard-liner on criminal-rights issues.
"Far more than most of us, he has labored to make the law the servant of justice and decency," Justice John Paul Stevens said in a tribute to Blackmun Wednesday.
New Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote Blackmun: "You have shown us all that it is possible constantly to grow in wisdom and in humanity."
Randall Bezanson, a former Blackmun law clerk and now dean of Washington & Lee University Law School in Lexington, Va., said Blackmun's qualities will be hard to replace.
"He viewed the Constitution as a living document that affects people's lives, not just a classroom exercise," said Bezanson. "He influenced the way the court as a whole looked at cases."
To conservatives, though, Blackmun's approach is nothing more than legislating from the bench.
"The American people are looking to see whether President Clinton supports a moderate, balanced Supreme Court or will cave in to the far left's attempt at a hostile takeover of the federal judiciary," said Thomas Jipping of the conservative Coalitions for America.
Exactly how Blackmun's departure will affect the ideological balance on the court is hard to assess.
As Blackmun himself said Wednesday, the court's "nucleus of conservatism" remains in force. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, form the most powerful bloc, often drawing the votes of moderate justices such as Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor and David Souter.
Blackmun, by seniority and persuasion, is the dominant justice on the left, joined more often than not by Stevens. Ginsburg has yet to establish her political identity, but will likely join that moderate-left wing.
With Blackmun leaving as early as the end of the term this summer, the vitality of the court's left-end spectrum is in doubt - unless Clinton appoints someone with instant clout and drawing power.
Blackmun said Wednesday that he and Stevens, both nominees of Republican presidents, have joked about how they are now viewed as liberals.
"Each of us steadfastly adhere to the proposition that neither of us has changed, the court has changed under us," said Blackmun.
And he reflected on the gradual shifts that always take place on the court through the process of appointment.
"The pendulum swings, and there'll come a time when we'll worry about it being too liberal as people did a few decades ago," he said. "And I haven't the least idea who will be appointed. I hope it's a good one."
'What am I doing here?'
First day as justice: "I was escorted into the robing room where the justices had gathered, and . . . the inevitable question dawned on me, and I hope it dawns on everybody else when he comes here, and that is, 'What am I doing here?' "
Why he's retiring: "Eighty-five - that's an awful lot of years, and I don't want . . . to reach a point where my senility level reaches unacceptable proportions, and I don't want to be asked to retire, as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was."
Opposing the death penalty: "I have been chafing a little bit for some time . . . about the death penalty, and when I issued that dissent . . . it didn't create any ripples within the court. One of the justices called me and . . . said, 'I'm very proud of you for taking that position.' "
Other justices: "There have been moments of tension, of course. But . . . that's what the court is all about, and the tension builds up, but it gets dispelled now and then."
