"We don’t know when or even if the history section in Blackmun’s abortion opinions was ever cite-checked. But we do know that if it happened, the fact-checking was faulty. For when Blackmun accepted Larry Lader, a mere magazine writer, as a reliable authority on history, philosophy, and theology, he became as a blind man following a blind guide. Despite his best efforts, Harry failed to see he had embraced a well-crafted verbal mirage, mistaking it for the truth. Let us be very clear about what happened here. The picture that emerges from Blackmun’s papers, available for public inspection at the U.S. Library of Congress, is that of a justice who, in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning, pro-abortion historian David J. Garrow, “ceded far too much of his judicial authority to his clerks.” It is plain from an inspection of Blackmun’s papers that his clerks made “historically significant and perhaps decisive contributions to Roe and Doe”-a degree of involvement Garrow calls “indefensible.”"