Nominee Has Avoided Ideological Extremes

Arizonans Praise Record, Say Stands Hard to Predict

Her benchside manner is so st.em, her stare so penetrating, that some young lawyers call her “laser eyes.” Her written opinions tick off the law, tick off the precedents and fit in the facts, all without rhetoric or aside§. They are the work of a technician, not an ideologue. In a stat.e where ideological extremes flourish, Sandra D. O’Connor has shown a knack for avoiding them throughout her career as a lawyer, state senator and judge. As a politician, she has been on either side of the Equal Rights Amendment and the abortion issue. As a judge, she is described as a tough sentencer, capable of imposing the death penalty. . But as she demonstrated in a 1978 murder case, she is just as capable of wiping out her own sentence and ordering a new trial when she thinks something has gone wrong in the process of criminal justice. For these reasons, her nomination was endorsed by virtually all those who know her in Arizona, from conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater to the head of the Arizona American Civil Liberties Union. At the same time, the state’s lawyer have given her consistently high marks in the bar association’s ratings of judges in the state. And for the same reasons, most lawyers said it would be risky t.o predict how she might vote on many of the controversial issues that will confront the Supreme Court. At 51 she is young for a Supreme Court justice, and her term of service could carry her far beyond any of the current