Justice Blackmun Expected to Retire : Supreme Court: The 85-year-old author of Roe vs. Wade opinion will likely announce his resignation today. Clinton may seek a ‘coalition builder’ to fill the post.

Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, the 85-year-old author of the Roe vs. Wade opinion that made abortion legal, is expected to announce his retirement today, according to Clinton Administration officials.

The fourth oldest person ever to serve on the court, Blackmun has broadly hinted in recent months that this term, ending in late June, would be his last. Court officials said he has not hired law clerks for the next term and Administration officials said that they expect Blackmun will issue a letter today announcing his resignation at the end of the term.

President Clinton, who paid tribute to Blackmun at a January retreat in South Carolina, told reporters Tuesday night that he has not discussed the pending retirement with the justice.

“Let Justice Blackmun speak for himself,” Clinton said after a town hall meeting in Charlotte, N.C. “I have not spoken with him.”

The departure of Blackmun, the most liberal of the nine justices, is not likely to alter the ideological makeup of the court. However, it will give Clinton a second chance to put his stamp on the panel--and possibly, as White House aides put it, fill the post with a “coalition builder” who could bring together moderate and liberal members of the court.

The White House is expected to move quickly to nominate Blackmun’s successor. Last year, the President spent 83 days--making several false starts--before settling on Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg as his first Supreme Court nominee.

This year, the list of potential nominees has been pared.

The leading candidate is said to be retiring Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell, 60, a Maine Democrat and a former federal judge. Mitchell issued a surprise announcement last month that he was quitting politics at the end of this year to pursue other, unspecified challenges.

A year ago, when word reached the White House that Justice Byron R. White was retiring, Clinton reportedly exclaimed: “Do you know who would be perfect for that job? George Mitchell!”

But the President was soon talked out of that notion because the White House could not afford to lose the influential Democratic leader of the Senate.

Nonetheless, Clinton has maintained his interest in putting a political leader on the court, a jurist who could forge a moderate-liberal coalition.

Even this year, however, a Mitchell nomination could pose problems. With the legislative fight over health care looming, the White House still needs his leadership in the Senate for the remainder of 1994.

The other top candidates are said to be U.S. District Judge Jose Cabranes, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and U.S. Solicitor General Drew S. Days III. Cabranes was considered for the last court opening and would become the first Latino justice, if he is chosen. Babbitt was a finalist last time. Days, a former Yale Law professor, is one of the Administration’s top-ranking African Americans.

Deputy White House Counsel Joel Klein was to travel to Charlotte today to brief Clinton on the impending resignation.

“There has been some preliminary thinking at the staff level . . . but the President has not engaged in any serious conversation on this yet,” a senior Administration official said late Tuesday. Asked if the White House is likely to seek a minority or another woman candidate, the official said that “the feeling is he has a free hand to go wherever he wants,” largely because he chose a woman for the court last time.

Advisers to former President George Bush looked long and hard to find a Latino judge for the high court and briefly considered Cabranes. Clinton Administration officials said that they would dearly love to put the first Latino on the court and Cabranes is said to remain the top Latino candidate.

Two long-shot possibilities reportedly are Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Assistant Atty. Gen. Walter Dellinger, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Blackmun’s departure after 24 years on the court culminates one of the more remarkable transformations in court history. A little known Republican judge from St. Paul, Minn., he was nominated in 1970 by President Richard Nixon, mostly because of a strong recommendation by his boyhood friend, fellow Minnesotan and then-Chief Justice Warren E. Burger.

Blackmun was Nixon’s third choice for the vacancy left by the sudden resignation of Justice Abe Fortas. Nixon’s first two nominees--Southern judges F. Clement Haynsworth Jr. and G. Harrold Carswell--met defeat in the Senate.

Frustrated, Nixon turned to a safe choice, but promised that the appeals court judge from St. Paul would be a “strict constructionist” and “law and order” jurist. And at first, Blackmun ran true to that form. As one of the four “Nixon justices,” he cast crucial votes to strengthen criminal law and to restore the death penalty.

Blackmun voted so often with Burger that they became known as the “Minnesota Twins.”

But after writing the landmark abortion rights opinion in 1973, Blackmun began a gradual shift to the left. His closest friend on the court became Justice William J. Brennan, the panel’s leading liberal, and Blackmun became increasingly disaffected with Burger.

In their later years, the two hardly spoke and Blackmun took delight in circulating stories that portrayed the white-haired chief justice as a petty dunderhead.

By the 1980s, Blackmun stood with the court’s reliable liberals as a defender of affirmative action, a proponent of strict separation between church and state and, of course, a champion of abortion rights.

Why did Blackmun become the leading voice for abortion rights? Friends noted his background as a general counsel for the renowned Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Over many years, they said, Blackmun associated with more doctors than lawyers. It has been often noted that his Roe vs. Wade decision reads more like the work of a medical historian than a constitutional lawyer.

And perhaps even more important was his family. His energetic and engaging wife, Dotty, and their three daughters did far more than any law book to influence Blackmun toward becoming the court’s leading advocate of women’s rights, his friends have said.

In 1989, Blackmun predicted that the Roe decision would “go down the drain,” defeated by new justices appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bush.

But to his surprise and delight, the abortion right survived in 1992, thanks largely to the votes of three Reagan-Bush appointees: Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter. Joining Blackmun and Justice John Paul Stevens, they formed a five-member majority to uphold the basic right to choose abortion in the case of Casey vs. Planned Parenthood.

“Now, just as so many expected the darkness to fall, the flame has grown bright,” Blackmun wrote.

In similar transformation in February, Blackmun broke with his own written precedents and denounced capital punishment as unconstitutional.

“From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death,” he wrote.

At the court, Blackmun is seen as something of a loner. He has never been an intellectual leader among the justices. Throughout his career, he often agonized for weeks over close cases and on occasion later changed his mind and repudiated a previous decision. During oral arguments, he rarely asks a question and never engages attorneys in a debate.

But he has remained a hard worker well into his ninth decade. On weekdays, without fail, he can be seen in the court’s cafeteria at 8 a.m. eating breakfast with his four law clerks.

Clerks said that Blackmun still labors for months over a majority opinion and, to their dismay, he even personally checks the legal citations they have supplied.

Times staff writers John M. Broder in Charlotte, N.C., and David Lauter in Washington contributed to this story.