Word: connors
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...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...
Meanwhile, her awareness of real-world politics and her sense that the court shouldn't diverge too sharply from popular opinion were especially apparent in O'Connor's death-penalty votes. In 1989 she wrote the majority opinion allowing capital punishment of the mentally retarded, saying a "national consensus" that the practice was wrong had not yet formed. But by 2002 she was convinced things had changed and voted with the majority to end it. It was just the kind of switch that made the court's more doctrinaire conservatives nuts: "Seldom has an opinion of this court rested...
...historic appointment of SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR as the first female Supreme Court Justice was rooted in election politics...