Law review article

In Memoriam: A Tribute to Warren E. Burger

Law review article / By

A TRIBUTE TO WARREN E. BURGER

The Honorable Sandra Day O’Connor*

A Chief Justice is always a special figure in American history, and indeed, only sixteen Justices have held that position since our Constitution was ratified. Warren E. Burger was the fifteenth Chief Justice, and his seventeen years in that capacity were distinguished by his energy and his efforts to improve the judicial system throughout the United States. His life and his service as Chief Justice have left their imprint on many aspects of our legal system.

Chief Justice Burger graduated magna cum laude in 1931 from Saint Paul College of Law, the earliest forerunner of William Mitchell College of Law. He was the president of his law school fraternity, Phi Beta Gamma, which, in uncanny foresight, conferred upon him the title of “Chief Justice.” Warren Burger could not have attended a traditional day law school. He had married and started a family and found it necessary to hold a full-time job in the insurance industry to support his family. If it were not for the opportunity that Saint Paul offered him to attend law school classes at night, he would have been unable to enter the legal profession.

Throughout his career, Chief Justice Burger had a profound interest in raising the quality of the work of the judicial branch by improving the management of the courts. As Chief Justice, he worked to make the Supreme Court-and all courts-more responsive to the needs of those who used them. He left a legacy to the most

Law review article

Tribute to Justice Souter

Law review article / By

Abstract

When the U.S. Supreme Court Justices took their seats at the beginning of the 2009 Term, the Bench looked different. Gone from the Bench, after nineteen years, was David H. Souter. He returned to his home in New Hampshire, a state he likes enormously. Justice Souter will be missed by his former colleagues and by advocates before the Court, by legal scholars nationwide and by all who follow the Court’s work and activities.

I was privileged to serve on the Court with Justice Souter for more than fifteen years. He was an admirable Justice and is a cherished friend. While serving on the Court, Justice Souter produced 157 majority opinions, 121 dissenting opinions, and 83 concurring opinions. He served as the Circuit Justice for both the First and the Third circuits. His opinions were always thoroughly researched and written, with full explanations of the facts, the issues, and the governing principles. He cut no corners and explained his reasoning in depth.

His writing was evidence of his scholarly nature. He was, after all, a Harvard Law School graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, a former New Hampshire trial court judge, a New Hampshire supreme court justice, and a judge on the First Circuit Court of Appeals. His opinions, written while he was on the Supreme Court of the United States, were as methodical as they were measured. Justice Souter’s concurring opinion in Washington v. Glucksburg1 captured his judicial philosophy nicely. He wrote: “[T]he usual thinking of the common

Speech

Speech to International Association of Lawyers

Speech / By

Sandra Day O’Connor Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you President Venugopal. I have the privilege of meeting your president Venugopal in India a couple of years ago when I went to give a lecture there named for his father, who was also a most distinguished attorney in India. And I’m so pleased to be able to come here to this wonderful city of Philadelphia tonight. The birthplace of our nation’s constitution and an absolutely wonderful city. So you chosen a great place for your making. Technology is constantly shrinking our world. From cellular phones to fax machines, beepers to email, satellite communications to the internet. new forms of communication have enabled us to talk to each other, whenever and wherever we happen to be. But it takes more than technological capability to enable people from different nations to communicate effectively with each other. People from all nations need language skills, they need a deeper understanding of foreign cultures, and they need deeper familiarity with foreign traditions and values. A nation’s ability to meet these needs will largely determine its ability to cope, and what has become an increasingly multinational environment. The United States is just beginning to recognize these needs. High Schools here, which wants only talk French and Spanish, as foreign languages now offer Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and a host of other languages as well. American businesses have also responded to the increasing globalization of brain,

Law review article, Speech

Speech on judicial independence at Georgetown University

Law review article, Speech / By

Sandra Day O’Connor I’m going to get you on my next book tour if I ever have one. That’s fun. And thank you my wonderful former colleagues for showing up today. Justice Thomas Justice Souter, and I think Justice Alito is going to join us if he’s not already here. And thank every one of you for coming and participating in this conference. I think you’ve already heard from President to Julia, and Michael trainer, why we’re doing this.

And it’s already been mentioned that 100 years ago this year, Roscoe pound, who went on to become dean of the Harvard Law School, gave his well publicized address to the American Bar, call the causes of popular dissatisfaction with the administration of justice. And he warned in that speech that we must not be deceived into overlooking or underwriting the real and serious dissatisfaction with courts and lack of respect for the law, which exists in the United States today. And I think that statement holds true today as well. We have promoted in this country, the notion of the rule of law as a means for helping ensure peace around the world, in our work with the emerging nations with the breakup of the Soviet Union, and in other countries we have actively urged upon every nation that we be concerned with the rule of law and The key component to that is a fair, impartial and independent judiciary. For a long time, I think the federal judiciary in this country has certainly been noted in other countries and admired and many would want to copy it. I

Law review article

A Tribute to Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

Law review article / By

VOLUME 101 DECEMBER 1987 NUMBER 2

HARVARD LAW REVIEW

A TRIBUTE TO JUSTICE LEWIS F. POWELL, JR.

Sandra Day O’Connor*

Changes in the composition of the Supreme Court are both inevitable and inevitably significant. As the law and the nation are to some degree shaped by the Court, so the Court is shaped by the Justices who serve on it. It is fitting, on the occasion of Justice Lewis F. Powell’s retirement, to reflect on the role of individual character in the work of the Court.

Justice Powell’s decision to retire, which came as a surprise to his eight colleagues, provides a particularly apt moment for such reflection because of Justice Powell’s extraordinary personal qualities. His departure from the Court is an important event for many different reasons, and I leave others to speculate about the effects on the publicly visible aspects of the Court’s work. I wish to focus instead on the man himself and especially on why his leaving is so poignant for those of us who remain.

Few people join the Court without their fair share of outstanding personal accomplishments. With respect to how many of the Justices, however, could their colleagues say, years later, “His very presence among us, day to day and on the bench, was something each of us valued – indeed, treasured”? I can say that about Justice Powell, for I have known no one in my lifetime who is kinder or more courteous than he. If at times he was unhappy or frustrated with one of us, he never expressed a harsh thought or

Magazine article

Center Court

Magazine article / By

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor got her job through affirmative action. It was obvious to officials in the Reagan Justice Department, as they searched for a Supreme Court justice in the summer of 1981, that she lacked the usual qualifications for the high court. “No way,” Emma Jordan, an assistant to the then Attorney General William French Smith, recalls thinking. “There were gaps in her background where she had clearly been at home having babies. She had never had a national position. Under awards, she had something like Phoenix Ad Woman of the Year.” No matter. President Reagan wanted to appoint the first woman justice, so he named O’Connor.

Last week O’Connor in a sense returned the favor by playing the critical role in the most important affirmative-action case in decades. She cast the fifth and deciding vote and wrote the court’s opinion in upholding the right of the University of Michigan Law School to use race as a factor in admissions. As a practical matter, her ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger gives a powerful judicial boost to affirmative action in education, a source of legal confusion and bitter debate in recent years. O’Connor, a moderate Republican, was hailed as a somewhat unlikely hero by liberal groups. She is seen as living proof that affirmative action works. There are now two female Supreme Court justices (the other is Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who did have the usual qualifications), and half the seats in America’s law schools are filled by women. And one of the Bush

Newspaper mention, The Kauffman-Henry Collection

But can Sandra O’Connor type?

Newspaper mention, The Kauffman-Henry Collection / By

One more Sandra O’Connor story …. The woman who is the president’s pick to serve as the first female Supreme Court justice didn’t always find her legal skills in demand. After she graduated from Stanford Law School with high marks and impeccable credentials, private law firms in California still closed their doors to her. “They had never hired a woman,” she said in a 1978 interview with Today’s Living. “They weren’t prepared to change. I was offered a job as a secretary provided I could type well.” So instead, she went to work as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo. Now for a chorus of Who’s sorry now?

Law review article

Balancing Act

Law review article / By

COURT IN

•

anc1n

RICHARD BRUST

HEN SHE LOOKS BACK ON IT, TULANE UNIVER

sity professor Nancy Maveety senses a wist ful quality to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion in one of the two Ten Command ments cases decided this June.

“It reads like a parting shot,” says Maveety, who chronicled O’Connor’s career in a 1996 biography, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: Strat

egist on the Supreme Court. “It was philosophical and reflective. It hit on the large themes of religion in American life.”

O’Connor’s opinion in McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, 125 S. Ct. 2722, was among the 75-year-old justice’s last, is sued just four days before the announcement that she would retire from the court. As befits a valedictory, the writing sounded pensive, Maveety says, different from the justice’s usual straightforward style. An example:

“At a time when we see around the world the violent consequences of the assumption of religious authority by government, Americans may count themselves fortunate: Our regard for constitutional boundaries has protected us from similar travails, while allowing private religious exercise to flourish Given the history of this particular display of

the Ten Commandments, the court correctly finds an establishment clause violation Thepurpose behind the counties’ display is rele

vant because it conveys an unmistakable message of endorsement to the reasonable observer.”

Richard Brust is an assistant managing editor for the ABA Journal.

Law review article

A Woman Decides: Justice O’Connor and Due Process Rights of Choice

Law review article / By

A Woman Decides: Justice O’Connor and Due Process Rights of Choice*

Peggy Cooper Davis•• and Carol Gilligan•••

We have been asked to address Justice O’Connor’s reproductive rights jurisprudence. Of course, the mention of Justice O’Connor in a sentence with reproductive rights calls to mind a familiar narrative: a story of opposition to-and vindication of-Roe v. Wade’s I central holding. Its subject is the constitutional principle that state regulation of a woman’s decision whether to continue or abort a pregnancy must be measured in ways that reflect the fundamental importance, in our constitutional scheme, of uncoerced decision making about such life-defining matters as marriage, procreation, parenting, and the manner of one’s death.2 Its hero is Justice O’Connor. The story’s basic plot is as follows: a president opposed in principle to the termination of pregnancies by abortion appointed Justice O’Connor to the Supreme Court bench in the hope that she would supply a vote crucial to overturning Roe and returning to states the authority to prohibit and criminalize abortion. In decisions spanning her first ten years on the Supreme Court bench, the Justice developed an influential critique of the reasoning of Roe. In 1992, however, she joined fellow centrists on the Court to reaffirm Roe’s central holding and to reaffirm as well the broader constitutional right to a significant measure of freedom from state coercion in making basic and intensely personal life choices. As the

Law review article

A Pragmatist on the Bench

Law review article / By

The Pragmatist on the Bench: The Western and Political Roots of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Samuel Kleiner and Julius Taranto* Yale Law School

* Samuel Kleiner and Julius Taranto are students at the Yale Law School. We wish to thank the editors of the Arizona Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies for originally publishing this article and thank the O’Connor Institute and Sarah Suggs for publishing an updated version of the article. We thank the many individuals who read versions of this article as we developed it and, of course, all errors are our own. In her dedication of the courthouse named in her honor in downtown Phoenix, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor closed her remarks by quoting Winston Churchill’s famous adage that, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”2 As she stood at the Courthouse that would bear her name in the center of Phoenix, she couldn’t help reflecting on how she had been shaped by her own history in the state. She had not aspired to be a lawyer, let alone a Justice on the Supreme Court, and had wanted to be a “cattle rancher” like her father when she grew up.3 Her legal career began in 1957 in Phoenix when she went into practice on her own after finding that none of the established firms in town would hire a woman.4 Perhaps more so than any recent Supreme Court Justice, Justice O’Connor’s rise to the Court was intimately bound up with the state from which she came. She lacked any experience in Washington D.C.; her entire professional