Word: connor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Connor worked for the Army after John was drafted and posted to Germany, and when the couple returned to Arizona, set up a private practice. She took five years off to have her three sons, then went back to work as an assistant state attorney general. At the same time, she became active in Republican Party politics, in time becoming the first woman in U.S. history to be elected majority leader of the state senate. When President Ronald Reagan was looking for a woman to name to the Supreme Court, O'Connor was one of the few with judicial...
...Connor graduated from high school at 16 and went off to Stanford University, where she fell in love with the law--and then, at Stanford Law School, with John O'Connor, a fellow law-review editor a year behind her. They married while he was still in school, but when she tried to get a job, no law firm would hire her, except as a secretary, although she had finished third in her class--two spots below classmate William Rehnquist. She eventually got a job in the San Mateo, Calif., county attorney's office by offering to start out working...
...didn't take long before O'Connor began confounding ideologues on the left and the right and bringing her considerable intellect to bear on the questions before her. She didn't just cast the final verdict--she helped shape important new law. For instance, it was O'Connor as much as Rehnquist, says University of Virginia law professor A.E. Dick Howard, who revived the doctrine of states' rights. The current court has knocked down more federal laws and upheld state sovereignty more often than any other in history, invalidating among other statutes a law that banned guns in school zones...
Abortion has been another key part of O'Connor's legacy--and another way to understand her careful navigation as an interpreter of the Constitution. In an important 1983 test of the limits of Roe v. Wade, for example, she voted to support an Ohio law requiring a 24-hour waiting period for women who want to have abortions. In her minority opinion, she pleased conservatives by writing that Roe as written was on shaky ground. But she didn't say it should be overturned. In a 1989 case she explicitly rejected an attempt to overturn Roe, but said restrictions...
...Connor's history on abortion is a perfect example of the minimalism to which Sunstein refers: Don't throw the precedent out entirely; don't endorse it uncritically, but define the circumstances where it applies. In finely tuned opinions for religion cases, O'Connor measured whether government support of, say, school prayer or vouchers amounted to an unconstitutional "endorsement" of religion. The Pledge of Allegiance's "under God" phrase passed her test; displaying the Ten Commandments on public property did not. That kind of approach is also evident in her handling of affirmative action. O'Connor was as allergic...