Smith scrawled his names on a pink telephone message slip in his office. Working with White House counsel Fred Fielding, Smith already had begun an informal short list of possible nominees. It had been six years since the last Supreme Court appointment, and all but two of the justices were over 65, so Smith’s request was not extraordinary. Without mentioning his conversation with Stewart, Smith said the office should prepare for the possibility of a vacancy occurring in the summer. The next day, Smith asked an assistant to begin research on a list of potential Supreme Court nominees. But he wanted his decision kept quiet until June. To give President Ronald Reagan time to pick a successor, Stewart needed to inform Smith now. Appointed to the bench by President Eisenhower, Stewart had decided to retire in June, at age 66, at the end of the Court’s term. The private meeting had been arranged by Stewart’s old friend George H. Read moreĪs you will recall, Sandra forced my hand by threatening to lead the revolution….Īs Sandra Day O’Connor celebrated her 51st birthday in suburban Phoenix on Thursday, March 26, 1981, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and Attorney General William French Smith spoke confidentially in the solarium of Stewart’s home in the lush Palisades neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC. I read the author's biography of Sonia Sotomayor on 26 June 2016 and liked it so well that I was eager to read this book and am glad I did. I found the book consistently attention-holding and never dull. The author went to Georgetown Law School and her handling of legal matters is good, though she makes no attempt to cover all of O'Connor's decisions-but she covers the main ones and does a good job on them. We would have been a lot better off if she were there still rather than her successor, Justice Alito. But by the time she left the Court she was a better justice than when she was first there. It is friendly to O'Connor but shows that she was a non-liberal when she was appointed but gradually she became a better justice, though fiercely Republican, as shown by her eagerness to put George W. Sandra Day O'Connor How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice, by Joan Biskupic (read ) This book was published in 2005 and covers up to O'Connor's retirement in 2005 but she served on the Court till January 2006 so it does not cover quite all of her time on the Court. In so doing, Sandra Day O'Connor also provides an unprecedented look inside the exclusive, famously secretive High Court. With an eye to the American people and a keen sense of public attitudes, she worked behind the scenes to shape the law and transform the legal standards by which future cases will be decided.įrom O'Connor's isolated upbringing on the Lazy B ranch in Arizona through her time as a state legislator to her rise as a justice - along the way confronting her own personal challenges and crises, including breast cancer - Biskupic presents a vivid, astute depiction of the justice - and of the woman beneath the black robe. Bush to take the White House in the 2000 contested presidential election.

O'Connor also cast one of the five votes that cut off the Florida recounts and allowed George W.

O'Connor's tie-breaking opinions on issues such as abortion rights, affirmative action, the death penalty, and religious freedom will have a lasting effect far into the future.

O'Connor was the feminist who, rather than rebel against the male-dominated system, worked from within - and succeeded.Īs Biskupic demonstrates, Justice O'Connor became much more than a 'first.' During her twenty-four-year tenure, she wrote the decisions on some of the most controversial social battles of our time. But in the back rooms of politics and the law, she was a determined, focused strategist. To all appearances, she was the polite lady in pearls, handbag on her arm. The portrait that emerges is of a complex and multifaceted woman: lawyer, politician, legislator, and justice, as well as wife, mother, A-list society hostess, and competitive athlete. Then, just one year short of a quarter century on the bench, she surprised her colleagues and the nation by announcing her retirement.ĭrawing on information from once-private papers of the justices, hundreds of interviews with legal and political insiders, and the insight gained from nearly two decades of covering the Supreme Court, Joan Biskupic examines O'Connor's remarkable career, providing an in-depth account of her transformation from tentative jurist to confident architect of American law. She was called the most powerful woman in America, and it was often said that to gauge the direction of American law, one need look only to O'Connor's vote. Sandra Day O'Connor, America's first woman justice, became the axis on which the Supreme Court turned.

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