ON HER OWN TERMS

“She was not raised to sit still,” remarked a weary clerk of Sandra Day O’Connor. Indeed not, as this lively life of the just-retired Associate Justice relates.

Supreme Court chronicler Biskupic writes, mostly admiringly but not unreservedly, of O’Connor, a tough but polite woman who grew up on an Arizona ranch headed by a never-pleased patriarch who, by most accounts, put the fear into everyone he met. Sandy Day was brilliant, a surprise to her classmates at Stanford Law School (including William Rehnquist, whom she briefly dated) and to hapless chauvinists in the Phoenix suburbs, to which she and her husband repaired in 1957. O’Connor served as a state legislator—a fellow senator, meaning to be complimentary, said of her, “this pretty little thing carries a disconcerting load of expertise”—and appeals-court judge before being shortlisted by Attorney General William French Smith to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1981. Though President Reagan had pledged to name a woman to the court, Biskupic writes, “O’Connor’s credentials did not make her an obvious candidate.” On closer examination, administration vetters found that she was politically well-connected and suitably conservative, though big-C rightists had fits when they discovered that O’Connor was generally pro-choice. No matter: she easily passed the audition, only to take a mostly independent course on the bench that put her at odds with doctrinaire types on the left and right alike. Biskupic does a solid job of charting O’Connor’s evolution as a judge who, given her druthers, preferred to seek consensus and split the difference in a given dispute over the slash-and-burn approach of certain other jurists, notably bête noire Antonin Scalia. O’Connor shaped the law, Biskupic concludes, “with her Western pragmatism, her feel for the American center—and a shrewd but quiet negotiating skill.”

Fitting farewell to an influential jurist who may soon be very much missed.