O’Connor proves justices can be popular

It can be said of Supreme Court justices that most Americans would not know one when they saw one. This year, however, one made the cover of People magazine. Sandra Day O’Connor is stopped in public places and asked for autographs. It can be said of oral argument at the Supreme Court that it is not one of the most popular shows in town. But this year, attendance by the public in the first two months of the term increased 30 percent. The eight other justices seem socially invisible in this town. But there are so many requests for social commitments by O’Connor that she apparently does not have time to see fully what she is getting into. O’Connor recently found. herself contributing two autographed copies of the Decl8.l’ation of Independence to what turned out to be a fundraising auction for a legal defense fund. That is taboo for Supreme Court justices. A court spokesman said that being “flooded with requests, she was unaware” of the auction’s purpose. Nobody cares much about the comings and goings of, say, Justice Harry A. Blackmun. Nobody cared, for example, that Chief Justice Warren E. Burger rode a bicycle until an accident some years ago. This year, there have been several inquiries about where O’Connor takes her exercise class, an item and cartoon in the American Bar Association journal about how she was asked for check-cashing identification at a local supermarket and a mention in the Ear gossip column about how she was spotted unloading personal belongings from a UHaul