But this was also a time when much of our body politic was in flux. The Vietnam War was ending, and President Richard Nixon, caught up in the Watergate scandal, had resigned. But trumping all of this was a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which came to be commonly known as Roe v. Wade. Fortuitously, the justice who penned the majority opinion legalizing abortion on a national scale, even as late as the third trimester of pregnancy, Harry Blackmun, was the father of one of my law school classmates, Sally Blackmun.
This coincidence, if one could call it that, of course generated more than the usual amount of interest and discussion by not just my law school classmates, but also our professors, particularly those who taught constitutional law.