Edward Devitt (1911-1992) was born into an Irish working class family in Saint Paul. He attended Van Buren Elementary School where he was a younger schoolmate of Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun. After the death of his father in 1921, the family moved to East Grand Forks, Minnesota. From 1926 to 1932 he attended St. John's Preparatory School and St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota and from 1932 to 1935 he went to the University of North Dakota where he earned his law degree.
Devitt’s legal career began in 1935 with his election as an East Grand Forks municipal judge. Four years later he was later appointed an assistant Minnesota attorney general until 1942 when he went into the armed forces. He served as a lieutenant commander to the Seventh Fleet in U.S. Navy intelligence during World War II until 1946.
Edward Devitt (1911-1992) was elected to the Fourth Congressional District seat as a Republican in 1946, but lost the seat two years later to Eugene McCarthy. After his short-lived political career he returned to the bench as a Ramsey County probate judge and became a U.S. district judge in 1954, serving until 1981. He died in St. Paul in March 1992 at the age of 80.
Judge Devitt was the co-author of Federal Jury Practice and Instructions and chaired the American Bar Association Legal Advisory Committee on Fair Trial-Free Press. His most notable cases were the 1961 racketeering trial of Minneapolis gangster Isadore “Kid Cann” Blumenfeld, and the Reserve Mining environmental pollution trial of the mid 1970’s. The Devitt home at 716 Van Buren (today’s Surrey) has been torn down and, perhaps fittingly, the land on which it stood is part of the grounds of his old school.
]]>Harry Blackmun (1908-1999) and his family lived at 847 East Fourth Street after they moved to St. Paul from southern Illinois in 1910. His father was a businessman who owned nearby groceries at 198 Bates and 376 Maria. Harry attended Van Buren Elementary School and graduated from Mechanic Arts High School. After winning a scholarship and attending Harvard University, he graduated from the Harvard Law School. Between 1950 and 1959, Blackmun served as resident counsel for the Mayo Clinic and described the job as "his happiest time" as opposed to later judicial work where he "performed his duty.”
Blackmun was appointed to the Eighth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1959 and stayed there until he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1970. He had been a good friend with Warren Burger since grade school and was even best man at his wedding. Initially the two usually voted together and were sometimes called “The Minnesota Twins.”
But Blackmun slowly began siding with the liberal faction of the court and toward the end of their careers their friendship had cooled. He is probably most remembered for his written opinion on Roe v. Wade in 1973, but was also very concerned with First Amendment rights of free press, Sixth Amendment rights of fair trial and the need to end capital punishment. Blackmun retired from the Supreme court in 1994.
]]>Former chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court Warren Burger (1907-1995) lived with his six siblings in a two-bedroom cottage at 695 Conway from 1914 to 1933. His father worked as a railway cargo inspector and sometime traveling salesman so the German-Swiss family’s financial circumstances were limited.
Burger attended Van Buren School and graduated from Johnson High School in 1925, where he edited the school newspaper and earned letters in athletics. He then worked days as an insurance salesman while he attended night classes at the University of Minnesota and St. Paul College of Law.
In 1969, President Richard Nixon appointed Burger to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a position he held until he resigned in 1987 to devote his energy to serving as chairman of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution.
He was part of the conservative wing of the Court and was considered a very competent administrator who made the Court’s work more efficient. Burger was a tireless promoter of judicial reform, working to increase the competence of lawyers trying cases in federal courts and promoting a national court of appeals.
One source suggests that the Burger House was constructed in 1884, but that is not correct. In fact, Warren’s grandfather, a civil war hero bought, remodeled and added to the already existing McLean School that was built in 1871. It was no longer needed because the city had replaced it with a much larger Van Buren School. The family moved into the former schoolhouse in 1884.
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