The Bar’s stamp of approval becomes an after-thought

NATIONAL-The American Bar Association is taking a long, hard look at Sandra O’Connor’s qualifications to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court

But the U.S. Senate that is expected to routinely confirm O’Connor before the court’s fall session begins in October will know what the ABA thinks of the Arizona Court of Appeals judge before the_public does. The Reagan administration apparently has ordered the ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary to keep the report under wraps until the hearings.

Chairwoman Brooksley Landau, a Washington lawyer, is refusing to say if Reagan has authorized the ABA to release the report when it’s completed – a polite way of saying it won’t be. Reagan waited until the last minute to inform the ABA he was nominating O’Connor, coming perilously close to ignoring a Presidential tradition of seeking a pre-nomination imprimatur from the nation’s largest association of lawyers, but the national press doesn’t seem interested in asking why.

Some skeptics in the legal community are suggesting the committee might designate O’Connor as a judicial lightweight, whose relatively brief trial court tenure doesn’t give her the length and depth in constitutional law expected of justices. O’Connor doesn’t have as many years on the bench as Reagan’s other female finalists, the skeptics note.

On the other hand, O’Connor brings to the court the kind of nuts-and-bolts trial experience ~at could keep the Supremes from wandering too often into legal esoterica that reads