To me, she was all the time Mrs. O’Connor, the mother subsequent door. But she was all the time—even then, within the mid-Nineteen Sixties within the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona—the one that can be Justice O’Connor. Lengthy earlier than her breakthrough appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court docket made her one in every of America’s most famed jurists, Sandra Day O’Connor confirmed the qualities of pragmatism, knowledge, and persistence with human frailty that marked her time on the Court docket—and make her legacy extra treasured than ever in the present day.
Once I was 6, my household moved right into a brand-new home in Phoenix. Earlier than the development was completed, I encountered a boy my age taking part in amid the studs, wires, and bins of nails. (Boys may do such issues again then.) One of many three O’Connor boys, he turned out to be a neighbor. As a result of we went to high school collectively down the road, I discovered myself typically going out and in of the O’Connors’ home, a low-slung desert rambler, constructed distinctively with adobe bricks. I nonetheless recall the pitch and inflection of Mrs. O’Connor’s greeting: “Properly, howdy, Jon Rauch!”
Mrs. O’Connor didn’t placed on airs. For me, the spotlight of yearly was Halloween on the O’Connors’ place, which they transformed right into a multiroom haunted home. Cackling wickedly and stirring a effervescent cauldron of dry ice, Mrs. O’Connor dressed up as a black-caped, pointy-hatted witch, whereas her husband, John, lumbered round with a monster masks on his face and a plastic knife by way of his neck.
But I quickly turned conscious that the mother subsequent door was a formidable personage. She gave the impression to be concerned in each sort of group exercise. My father, himself a lawyer, instructed me that Mrs. O’Connor was a hard-driving, sensible, and omnisciently ready legal professional. He associated how, when she was an assistant state legal professional basic and he was representing a welfare claimant, he’d skilled each litigator’s worst nightmare: In open court docket, she’d uncorked an authoritative statute he had by no means heard of. (He misplaced.) Nobody was stunned when she was appointed to the state Senate and rose to be its first—and the nation’s first—feminine majority chief. Following that, she was appointed a decide on Arizona’s Court docket of Appeals.
Phoenix within the ’60s and ’70s was a conservative, solidly Republican state—residence to Barry Goldwater, the fiercely anti-communist, anti-union U.S. senator and 1964 Republican presidential candidate. (His hilltop home was within reach of my neighborhood.) For probably the most half, although, Arizona’s model of Republican was buttoned-down and businesslike. William Rehnquist, the longer term U.S. chief justice and one other Phoenix Republican fixture in these days, was thought of far-right. Sandra Day O’Connor embodied the occasion’s heart: conservative however pragmatic, oriented towards fixing issues slightly than creating or amplifying them.
The identical no-nonsense, get-it-done perspective that made her an individual who befitted any boardroom or group group made her the sort of legislator and decide round whom folks gathered and for whom issues occurred. You knew you could possibly depend on Mrs. O’Connor to be the grown-up within the room.
That persona traveled together with her to the nation’s highest court docket. In 1981, when Potter Stewart’s seat opened and President Ronald Reagan pledged to fill it with a lady, I instructed pals that I knew the proper particular person—however that the president would by no means choose her, as a result of she was too little recognized and insufficiently ideological for the occasion’s already fiercely conservative proper. However Goldwater, of all folks, went to bat for her. So started a Supreme Court docket profession that, to today, stays underappreciated.
Justice O’Connor’s jurisprudence flummoxed and aggravated authorized students. She had no overarching judicial philosophy, not like conservatives such because the combative originalist Antonin Scalia, the purist libertarian Clarence Thomas, or the dedicated textualist Neil Gorsuch. Her opinions could possibly be murky and temporizing. She was conservative, little doubt about that, however she was additionally a justice who had beforehand been a working politician, and it confirmed in her holdings: She regarded for options and, extra vital, for tactics to make sure that common folks may search for options. She understood the Court docket’s function as political—not within the activist sense of legislating from the bench, however within the realist sense of seeing the Court docket as embedded in a political matrix the place inflexible doctrine may do extra hurt than good. Identified for years because the Court docket’s swing vote—for some time, some known as it the O’Connor Court docket—she was additionally, on many events, its anchor to actuality.
It was like her to rule, in Grutter v. Bollinger, that affirmative motion may proceed in college admissions—however just for some time, not ceaselessly. It was like her, in Deliberate Parenthood v. Casey, to trim however not eradicate the constitutional proper to an abortion. Her difference-splitting holdings infuriated constitutional purists on each side, however she adopted a better sort of constitutionalism: a recognition that not each subject is ripe to be determined judicially.
Generally, just like the mother she was, she wanted to inform the children to return and check out more durable. Ambiguity and compromise, she noticed, could possibly be very important points of Supreme Court docket jurisprudence. If teachers and ideologues disapproved, a lot the more severe for them.
That the dearth of an O’Connor on in the present day’s Supreme Court docket has turn into a pricey deficit goes nearly with out saying. The Court docket is usually criticized for being too political, however Justice O’Connor’s advantage was that, having been a politician, she had an innate really feel for consensus and consent. At present, all 9 justices have been appointed from U.S. appellate courts or authorized academia. None has run for or held elective workplace. The consequence has been the sort of sweeping, ideologically inflected jurisprudence that Justice O’Connor prevented. She is rightly remembered because the Court docket’s first lady; she also needs to be remembered, alas, as its final politician.
In maturity, I principally misplaced contact with Mrs. O’Connor. Nonetheless, with time, I solely grew in my appreciation of her qualities. They’ve turn into lamentably scarce in American public life and particularly within the Republican Celebration, which owed her a lot and but turned so hostile to her legacy. After she retired from the Court docket, I used to be stunned when she took up the reason for civics training. Wasn’t this too marginal and small-bore a trigger for an individual of her stature? Now I perceive that, as ordinary, she was sensible and prescient.
Again in August 1981, when she was in Phoenix awaiting affirmation, I made the acquainted yard trek for a howdy go to. Regardless of her sudden elevation to international fame, there she was, the identical Mrs. O’Connor, breading fish filets within the kitchen.
Twenty-four years later, in 2005, she acquired my father and me in her Supreme Court docket chambers. At that time, she had submitted her resignation from the Court docket, however the current loss of life of Chief Justice William Rehnquist delayed her departure (which might not happen till the next 12 months). She expressed frustration, as a result of her husband’s rising dementia wanted her full consideration. She was nonetheless the problem-solver, the responsibility-taker, the grownup within the room—and he or she was wanted elsewhere.
Greater than ever, her spirit is required right here, in the present day.
