Word: connorism
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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...
That down-to-earth quality meant that O'Connor's opinions tended to be narrower and more case specific than those of her fellow Justices, her reasoning less sweeping and ideological. "She was the court's leading minimalist," says Cass Sunstein, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, "taking one case at a time, distrusting broad rules and abstract theories...
...while a minimalist might be expected to leave a legacy that would rank with those of the lesser lights in the court's history, O'Connor's impact was far greater in part because she could join either the more liberal or the more conservative side of a divided court, depending on the case. Her caution and sense of specificity made her the deciding voter on the nation's most highly charged social issues, such as abortion and affirmative action. Over the past decade, according to Goldstein & Howe, a Washington law firm, she voted with the majority in more than...
...Connor's independent and pragmatic idea of what America should be was forged in stages. The first took place on the Lazy B, a nearly 200,000-acre cattle ranch in the high desert on the Arizona--New Mexico border. The nearest town was 35 miles away, and the three Day children--Sandra, Ann and Alan--learned early that self-reliance was a necessary survival skill. When rain occasionally wet the arid land, she wrote in Lazy B, a 2002 memoir that she co-authored with Alan, "We were saved again--saved from the ever present threat of drought...
...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...