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Robed in Mystery by Dahlia Lithwick Excerpts from the article: IN the fall of 1992, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor spoke to my first-year law school class at Stanford University, her alma mater. My class, which was almost 50 percent women - black, Hispanic, gay and disabled women among... more
Reviewed by dougfus Jul 02 2005, 09:21am ( 1 review ) • nytimes.com
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Rated by dougfus on Jul 02 2005, 9:21am
Robed in Mystery by Dahlia Lithwick Excerpts from the article: IN the fall of 1992, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor spoke to my first-year law school class at Stanford University, her alma mater. My class, which was almost 50 percent women - black, Hispanic, gay and disabled women among them - received her warmly. She is, after all, a feminist pioneer. The first woman on the United States Supreme Court, Justice O'Connor broke through glass ceilings the way women of my generation broke nails. She, more than any other woman in the legal profession, proved that we could be whatever we wanted. Which is why her speech was so stunning: it was curt and unsentimental and - if recollection serves - it concluded with a lament about how annoying it is to receive late-night telephone calls from death row petitioners with only moments left before their executions. I left the hall furious, wondering how a woman could be so heartless. Suffice it to say, Justice O'Connor is a huge mystery to most women of my generation. How could someone who blew open doors for generations of women after her show so little empathy to female victims of violence in the 2000 case of United States v. Morrison, for instance, where she joined with the court's conservatives to invalidate the Violence Against Women Act, or to teenagers facing the death penalty in Roper v. Simmons last fall? How could someone who so embodies minority advancement not use her new power to pull everyone else up with her? Justice O'Connor's life story goes a long way toward explaining that philosophy: In the 2002 account of her childhood that she wrote with her brother, she paints herself as a tough old Arizona cowgirl who made her own luck through grit and self-reliance at a time when women considered just finding someone to marry the fulfillment of every fantasy. True, her conservative roots run deep, as she has proved innumerable times. But it's somehow impossible for me, both as a woman and as a lawyer, to stay mad at her. Because try as she may, she can't suppress an inner softie, and it has come to animate so much of her jurisprudence. Justice O'Connor's swing votes in so many of the most contentious areas of the law - religion, abortion, affirmative action, for example - show a sneaking strain of empathy for the outsiders, the disadvantaged, for those who feel coerced or shamed. Justice O'Connor's jurisprudence is narrow and fact-centered. Sometimes the lines she draws are visible only to her - something that has driven her colleague Antonin Scalia to near apoplexy on more than one occasion. But her position as one of the last real open-minded moderates - the tiebreaker in a generally polarized court - reveals how powerfully those skills in diplomacy, compromise and pragmatism that she developed as an early feminist can bear fruit. Ultimately, the women I know have come to love Justice O'Connor not just for what she is, but also, perhaps grudgingly, for what she has done as well. She has showed us that she could be more than just another justice on the court. She modeled fearlessness for those of us who still feel law is a man's game. And she showed us that greatness can be achieved by rolling up the sleeves of your black robe, and doing justice, one small case at a time.
