Sandra Day O’Connor: A Different Kind of Justice

WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 – This much is known so far about Sandra Day O’Connor: She is cool under pressure; she suffers fools gracefully; she has a sense of humor.
So far, this much can be predicted: She will need her sense of humor. The words “first woman Justice” are already cemented as firmly to her name as “reclusive billionaire” and “fugitive financier” were to the names of Howard R. Hughes and Robert L. Vesco.

Ordinarily articulate people seem to be rendered silly by the linguistic implications of a woman’s arrival at the Supreme Court. Since “the brethren” is now obsolete as a collective noun, what to do? “Eight brethren and a cistern,” was the suggestion offered, publicly, by a speaker who introduced Justice O’Connor the other night at the Washington Press Club.

If Justice O’Connor read her press clippings after the Court’s opening session this week, a random sample of news accounts would have told her that she arrived on the bench “dressed in a black, knee-length judicial gown,” that she was “looking small but undaunted behind the long, low bench,” that she put on a pair of glasses, and that she asked her first question 48 minutes into the opening argument “to show she was there to take a full part in the Court’s work.”

A Memory of Samuel Johnson

As the press clippings indicate, the tone of the welcome that Justice O’Connor has received in Washington has been more than a little reminiscent of Samuel Johnson’s remark 218 years ago about the similarity between a “woman’s