Newspaper article, The Kauffman-Henry Collection

Locals applaud selection

Newspaper article, The Kauffman-Henry Collection / By

Sun City area Republicans show popular support for Arizona Judge Sandra O’Connor’s nomination to the U.S . Supreme Court , a random sampling showed. ” I think it ‘s great ,” said Rep . Jim Ratliff, R-District 15. “I don’t think Reagan could have done better.” Other Sun Ci t y area residents echoed Ratliff’s comments, including Herbert Everett , who worked with Mrs . O’Connor in the Arizona Legislature as a Republican representative . “SHE WAS an outstanding legislator who worked very hard, ” the Youngtown resident said . ” I think she’ll make an outstanding justice. ” Sen. Anne Lindeman , R-District 17, said, ” I think the nomination was super-it couldn’t have happended to a nicer person . I think the Supreme Court will be better for it. ” Myrtle Macy, a Sun City resident , who knew Mrs . O’Connor through the Republican party, added , ” I was so thrilled when it was announced-I don’t think they could have found anyone better .” Mrs . Macy said she is pleased a woman was nominated to the court, a first in U.S . history. “ALL THE women have felt that when a person is qualified and has worked so hard that she should have the job .” Emma Ratliff , wife of Rep. Ratliff , said that her familiarity with Mrs. O’Conner spans a decade . “I’m not a women’s libber but she Is one of the best they could appoint,” she said . “That lady never lacks a word on anything-she really does her homework.” “I think she is the best person Reagan could have picked.” A FORMER Senate majority leader, Mrs.

Law review article

Lessons from Working for Sandra Day O’Connor

Law review article / By

LESSONS FROM WORKING FOR SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR

Kent D. Syverud*

Justice O’Connor doesn’t like footnotes in her opinions. That was a bracing lesson for a young lawyer fresh from a law review where a legion of footnotes, packed with authorities and afterthoughts, marched halfway up almost every page. Holding my first memo, she started right in on teaching: “If you have something to say, just say it. Don’t weasel around down in the brush.” There would be many other straightforward lessons from a year working for Sandra Day O’Connor, but the most important were about decisiveness, theory, inclusivity, and religion.

Making Decisions. In my first month on the job, the Supreme Court wrestled with a difficult capital case. Justice O’Connor and my co-clerk worked late into the night on an emergency petition, and by a close vote the petition was denied. There was an execution after midnight. The next morning, Justice O’Connor was in the office early and was cheerful. She told me of her “fabulous” plans for an event later that day. (“Fabulous” is Justice O’Connor’s most-often-used word.) Her cheerfulness that day seemed callous, and I confronted her about it. Even from a distance I had been torn up about both the substance and procedure of the decision, so how could she get over it so quickly? She wasn’t “over it,” she told me. She had been torn up too, but she had done the best job she could. The time to worry about a decision, she said, is before it is made. You work, read, and listen

Magazine article

Law’s Smallest Club

Magazine article / By

Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are polar opposites with abiding bonds.

AS USUAL, SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR WAS the first U.S. Supreme Court justice to pose a question during an oral argument. It was early this spring and at issue was the constitutionality of limiting visits to prison inmates. “Does the right to association while in prison survive in some form, do you think?” she asked Michigan solicitor general Thomas Casey, who was defending the regulations at issue in Overton v. Bazzetta. The right to a relationship survives, Casey suggested, but not necessarily any right to activities that further a relationship–such as visitation. Before O’Connor could follow up, the discussion took another turn. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg chimed in a few minutes later, asking Casey to “back up to where you were when you were responding to Justice O’Connor’s question. Ginsburg asked him directly, “Do I take it that your position is … there is absolutely no right to any visitation?” When Casey replied yes, O’Connor leaned forward and interjected acidly, “Do you have a fallback position from that and if so, what is it?”

It was a rare but striking example of the O’Connor-Ginsburg one-two punch, in which one of the Court’s two female justices makes sure an advocate does not slip away from the questioning of the other. As Ginsburg nears her tenth anniversary on the nation’s highest court-and O’Connor closes in on her twenty-second-the relationship between the Court’s first and

Law review article

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: Token or Triumph from a Feminist Perspective

Law review article / By

JUSTICE SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR: TOKEN OR TRIUMPH FROM A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE

INTRODUCTION

When Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was sworn in as the 102nd Justice of the United States Supreme Court,1 she made history. O’Connor was the first woman to attain a seat on the Court in its 199 years of existence.2 She represented a symbolic reward for nearly 200 years of struggle by women for political and social recognition in America. Feminists3 applauded not only her symbolic achievement• but also the potential substan tive effect she could have on women’s ongoing legal battles. O’Connor gained entry into the most powerful and prominent judicial entity in the nation and would have a tremendous op-

N.Y. Times, Sept. 26, 1981, at 8, col. 1. Shortly after Justice Potter Stewart of fered his resignation from the Supreme Court in May, 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced his selection of Judge Sandra O’Connor of Arizona as Stewart’s replacement in July. She was approved 99-0 in the Senate and took her seat on the Supreme Court in October, 1981. For reaction to her nomination, see A Woman for the Court, NEWSWEEK, July 20, 1981, at 16; The Brethren’s First Sister, TIME, July 20, 1981, at 8.

The only other time a woman was considered for a position on the Supreme Court was during the New Deal-World War II era of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. See Cook, Women as Supreme Court Candidates, 65 JUDICATURE 314 (1981-82) for a comparison of Judge O’Connor to Judge Florence Allen, the sole female

Law review article

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: Some Reminiscences

Law review article / By

JUSTICE SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR: SOME REMINISCENCES

The year was 1981. I had just graduated from law school and was clerking for Judge Albert Tate, Jr., now deceased, who then sat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. I had applied for a clerkship on the United States Supreme Court, as did virtually every other recent graduate who had done well at a good law school, and who landed a clerkship with a federal or state court. But I also knew that the odds for any applicant were extraordinarily low. The Court then took 34 law clerks annually. Each Justice had four clerks, except for then-Justice Rehnquist, who took three, Justice Stevens, who took two, and Chief Justice Burger, who had a fifth “superclerk” to help in matters of Court administration. Sometime in late summer 1981, President Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor, a state court judge from Arizona, to fill the spot vacated by Justice Potter Stewart. I asked Judge Tate, who was a liberal in his judicial outlook and a populist to the very core of his soul, to write on my behalf to the nominee. He replied, “Sure. But it won’t do you any good. She’s not likely to credit the opinion of an ‘activist’ like me.” He sent off a letter, and, like all realistic applicants for the job, I left my fate to the clerkship gods and returned to work drafting opinions and doing my bench memoranda. Several weeks after Judge Tate sent his letter, Justice O’Connor, who had by then been confirmed, summoned me to Washington

Law review article

Justice O’Connor’s Dilemma: The Baseline Question

Law review article / By

JUSTICE O’CONNOR’S DILEMMA: THE BASELINE QUESTION

SUZANNA SHERRY•

Many commentators view City of Boerne v. Flores,1 in which a divided Supreme Court struck down the Religious Freedom Res toration Act of 1993 (RFRA),2 as a major defeat in the battle for religious freedom in the United St ates.3 Be that as it may, Flores is also an opportunity to begin a discussion on another issue entirely: the appropriate relationship between dissenting Justic es and majority opinions. Should a Justice who disagrees with a majority of the Court nevertheless accept the majority’s holding as defining the law for purposes of establishing a baseline for subsequent questions?

THE BASELINE DILEMMA

In order to understand the question I will address, some brief background on Flores is necessary. Prior to 1990, the Supreme Court interpreted the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitu tion-applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amend ment-to require the government to accommodate religious beliefs by granting exemptions to those with religious objections to generally applicable laws, unless the government could show

Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Law, University of Minnesota. I would like to thank Jim Chen, Jack Cound, Paul Edelman, Dan Farber, Phil Frickey, and Barry Friedman for helpful comments on earlier drafts, and Betsey Buckheit, Minnesota J.D., 1999, for research assistance.

1. 117 S. Ct. 2157 (1997).

2. 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000bb to 2000bb-4 (1994).

3. A few,

Newspaper article, The Kauffman-Henry Collection

Justice O’Connor’s days in Charlottesville ‘idyllic’

Newspaper article, The Kauffman-Henry Collection / By

Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court’s first woman justice, and her husband, John J. O’Connor, lived in a towered Victorian house in Charlottesville for about 90 “idyllic” days in 1954. Justice O’Connor last week described the time she spent between February and May of that year in Charlottesville while her husband was a student at the U.S. Army Judge Advcate General’s School. • “We thoroughly enjoyed the three months we spent there in the spring,” she said. Mr. O’Connor, contacted in Phoenix, Ariz., where he is presently an attorney, said that he and his wife had lived in the solarium apartment of a large house at 620 Park Street, while he was a U.S. Army lieutenant in the basic class at JAG School. “We had only been married since Dec. 20, 1952; and neither of us had ever been East, so for us it was a very, very happy interlude. We loved Charlottesville, and we established some friendships at the JAG School which have lasted all these years,” Mr. O’Connor said. He recalled that a friend who had been in the previous JAG class was vacating the apartment on the comer of Park Street and Park Lane and recommended that they take it. He said he car-pooled to school with six other JAG students so their wives could always have a car. “We all got together and played charades – people don’t play that much anymore – and we went with friends to Williamsburg and Washington, D.C., never dreaming that someday that would be our ~anent.home. It was an ~e time in our lives,and 1 we developed

Law review article

Justice O’Connor Replaces Justice Stewart: What Effect on Constitutional Cases?

Law review article / By

Justice O’Connor Replaces Justice Stewart: What Effect On Constitutional Cases?

CHARLES D. KELSO*

Potter Stewart, a Republican from Ohio, was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1958 by President Eisenhower. By the time of his retirement in 1981, Justice Stewart had served through the Warren years and the first decade of the Burger era.1 Pres ident Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor to fill the vacancy. A Republican from Arizona, she served in its legislature and on its Court of Appeals. Lawyers who follow decisions of the Court are asking what difference her appointment will make in constitutional cases.

The question can be approached by studying the most recent term of the Court. From the pattern of votes, particularly how Justice Stewart stood in the 5-4 decisions, some inferences can be drawn. Another ap proach is to look back at 5-4 decisions in previous years where Justice Stewart’s vote with the majority was crucial to the outcome. Both ap proaches will be explored in this article.

During its 1980-81 term, the Supreme Court decided and wrote opin ions in 70 cases where constitutional issues were presented. The pat tern of votes was as follows:

J.D., 1950 University of Chicago; LL.M. 1962 Columbia University; LL.D., 1966 John Marshall Law School: J.S.D., 1968 Columbia University. Law Clerk to Mr. Justice Minton, 1950- 51; Former Associate Dean and Professor of Law, University of Miami, 1966-68; Professor of Law Indiana University; Professor of

Interview

Justice O’Connor brief interview

Interview / By

O’Connor House Justice, why is civic engagement important to us as a community? Sandra Day O’Connor We talked about the term “civic engagement.” And I think what we’re meaning when we talk about that is the notion that every one of us, as citizens in our community, needs to feel they’re a part of it, and that they will vote when there are things to vote on, and that they’ll discuss things with fellow citizens, that citizens’ opinions matter. I think that’s what we’re talking about.

O’Connor House And why is voting so important? If someone has never voted before, what would you tell them, the reason it’s important that they get to the polls?

Sandra Day O’Connor Most of the issues that are ones in which the registered voters in the community are eligible to vote on are things that all of us as citizens should care about. They’re the decisions that we make collectively, for how our community is to operate and run. And these are the issues that all of us care about. It is important to weigh in, to vote when you’re qualified to do so, and to participate by talking about these issues with our fellow citizens. O’Connor House How do we get more people to vote? How do you get people to come and decide that this is something that they’re going to take a half an hour out of their day to do? Sandra Day O’Connor How to get everyone out to vote on election day is a continuous question we have, because we have periodic election days, every year, year in and year out. And the question

Law review article

Justice O’Connor and the Substance of Equal Citizenship

Law review article / By

Throughout her twenty-two Terms of service on the Supreme Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has been subjected to labeling, and the labels form a pattern. She has been called a pragmatist;1 a centrist;’ a positivist3 who tends to defend the established legal order;4 a moderate conservative who typically favors a modest judicial role in lawmaking;5 a judge whose view of the structure of government emphasizes the defense of state sovereignty against undue intrusions of federal (judicial or legislative) power;6 a one-case-at-atime “minimalist” who seeks middle paths to decision and to doctrinal statement, and who prefers incremental movement to sweeping Kenneth L. Karst is David G. Price and Dallas P. Price Professor of Law Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles. AUTHOR’S N -E: My thanks to Alison Anderson, Devon Carbado, William Rubenstein, David Sklansky, Jonathan Varat, and Adam Winkler for their careful and sympathetic readings of a draft of this article. Four other UCLA colleagues would have been excellent sources, for they served as clerks for Justice O’Connor. I have deliberately steered clear of consulting them, or even showing them a draft of this article. At several points in the article I indulge in unbridled speculation, and I want to avoid any possible inference that a clerk has told tales out of school. I am grateful for the assistance of our law school’s splendid research librarians, especially Jennifer Lentz and Kevin Gerson. ‘ Robert W. Van Sickel, Not