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-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.
After 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 packing containers of nails. (Boys might 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 highschool 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, hey, 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 his neck.
But I quickly turned conscious that the mother subsequent door was a formidable personage. She appeared to be concerned in each form of neighborhood exercise. My father, himself a lawyer, advised me that Mrs. O’Connor was a hard-driving, sensible, and omnisciently ready lawyer. He associated how, when she was an assistant state lawyer normal 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 shocked 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 choose on Arizona’s Court docket of Appeals.
Phoenix within the ’60s and ’70s was a conservative, solidly Republican state—house to Barry Goldwater, the fiercely anti-communist, anti-union U.S. senator and 1964 Republican presidential candidate. (His hilltop home was close by of my neighborhood.) For probably the most half, although, Arizona’s model of Republican was buttoned-down and businesslike. William Rehnquist, the long run U.S. chief justice and one other Phoenix Republican fixture in these days, was thought-about far-right. Sandra Day O’Connor embodied the social gathering’s heart: conservative however pragmatic, oriented towards fixing issues reasonably than creating or amplifying them.
The identical no-nonsense, get-it-done angle that made her an individual who befitted any boardroom or neighborhood group made her the form of legislator and choose round whom folks gathered and for whom issues occurred. You knew you might 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 girl, I advised associates that I knew the proper individual—however that the president would by no means decide her, as a result of she was too little recognized and insufficiently ideological for the social gathering’s already fiercely conservative proper. However Goldwater, of all folks, went to bat for her. So started a Supreme Court docket profession that, to at the present time, stays underappreciated.
Justice O’Connor’s jurisprudence flummoxed and aggravated authorized students. She had no overarching judicial philosophy, in contrast to 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 essential, for tactics to make sure that common folks might search for options. She understood the Court docket’s position 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 might do extra hurt than good. Recognized 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 might 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 either side, however she adopted the next form of constitutionalism: a recognition that not each situation is ripe to be determined judicially.
Typically, just like the mother she was, she wanted to inform the youngsters to return and check out more durable. Ambiguity and compromise, she noticed, could possibly be important points of Supreme Court docket jurisprudence. If lecturers 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 out to be 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. Right this moment, 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 form of sweeping, ideologically inflected jurisprudence that Justice O’Connor averted. 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 out to be lamentably scarce in American public life and particularly within the Republican Occasion, which owed her a lot and but turned so hostile to her legacy. After she retired from the Court docket, I used to be shocked 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 standard, she was sensible and prescient.
Again in August 1981, when she was in Phoenix awaiting affirmation, I made the acquainted yard trek for a hey 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 demise 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 growing dementia wanted her full consideration. She was nonetheless the problem-solver, the responsibility-taker, the grownup within the room—and she or he was wanted elsewhere.
Greater than ever, her spirit is required right here, in the present day.
