When Sandra Day O’Connor resigned from the Supreme Court in July of 2005, almost exactly 24 years to the day after she was nominated by Ronald Reagan, it was the political left that wrung its hands in despair. Not necessarily for love of O’Connor, but with an appreciation that the conservative O’Connor had turned out to be a surprisingly moderate justice, a powerful voice of reason keeping the Court and the country from moving to political extremes. With her resignation and George W. Bush in the White House, the chances of a balanced Court were now slim to none.
Sandra Day O’Connor, Justice in the Balance by Ann Carey McFeatters, recounts the life of a woman who not only made history as the first female on the Supreme Court but who also became its most powerful member. O’Connor became the unpredictable “swing vote” in an otherwise evenly divided Court. As a result, her tiebreaking votes repeatedly became the decisions of the Court as a whole, giving her the ultimate power to affect the lives of millions of people with each judgment.
Justice in the Balance spends a good amount of time on O’Connor’s unusual upbringing on the Lazy B ranch, a massive acreage that straddled the Arizona-New Mexico line. With no children outside the family within miles and plenty of work to be done, Sandra Day’s best friends were ranchhands, and the expectation of everyone pulling his or her own weight forced Sandra to become strong and independent at a young age. (One disconcerting example of the ranch’s do-it-yourself ethic had O’Connor’s father holding a cow’s uterus in place by sewing an empty wine bottle into its body as a support.) The independence O’Connor learned at the Lazy B would propel her career and inform her Court decisions for years to come.
When O’Connor graduated third in her class from Stanford Law School (at just 22 years old) in 1952, her credentials meant much less than her sex, and she could not land a paying job as a lawyer in a man’s world. In fact, O’Connor initially worked for free, forced to prove that a woman was up to the task. But from there her rise in the judicial and political worlds was steady, serving as an Arizona state senator before being appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals (by a Democrat) and, ultimately, a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!