Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun '29, Former Kirkland House Master Mason Hammond '25 and Yale President Richard C. Levin and six others will receive honorary degrees at this morning's Commencement exercises.

Other degrees will go to:

* Musician, composer and conductor Bennett L. Carter;

* Vice President Al Gore '69, the Commencement speaker;

* President Clinton's Special Envoy to Haiti William H. Gray III;

* U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata;

* Carnegie Institute President Maxine F. Singer; and

* Former Shattuck Professor of Government James Q. Wilson.

This year's group of honorands is the smallest since 1991, when nine people received honorary degrees. Last year, 14 were honored; in 1992, 11 received honorary degrees.

Most of the honorands arrived in Cambridge this week, and all stayed at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston, sources said. Last night, they dined in Memorial Hall chicken and seven jewels terrine and striped bass.

Harry A. Blackmun '29

Blackmun, appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard M. Nixon in 1970, may be most noted for writing the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1972 case that legalized abortion.

Although Nixon appointed Blackmun because the thought the justice would bolster the Court's conserving wing, Blackmun eventually came to be considered perhaps the court's staunchest liberal.

Even this term, Blackmun, 85, was still making news on the Court. Citing years of torment over the issue, Blackmun announced that he opposed the death, penalty, calling it cruel and unusual punishment.

Asumma cum laude graduate in math, Blackmun later graduated from Harvard Law School in 1932.