Word: connors
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During the nearly five years since she took her place on the high bench, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has provided a reasonably dependable third vote for the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative wing. In a number of crucial cases, however, O'Connor has begun to split from her usual allies, Chief Justice Warren Burger and William Rehnquist, and has sometimes cast the decisive vote that yields a liberal result. Says Michael McDonald, general counsel of the conservative American Legal Foundation: "I wonder if she is traveling the route blazed by Justice Blackmun." Harry Blackmun, who moved from a close...
...intriguing example of O'Connor's independence came last week. Normally a strong supporter of police and prosecutors, she joined in a pair of significant rulings that strengthened the rights of black defendants (see box). One week earlier she astonished some court watchers by writing the majority opinion in a 5-to-4 libel decision requiring that in cases involving public concerns, private individuals must prove that damaging press assertions about them are false...
With many of the most difficult cases of this term still pending, it is too soon to measure clearly how much she is setting herself apart from the other conservatives. But in the words of former Solicitor General Rex Lee, who has known O'Connor since both practiced law in Arizona, "After four or five years, many members of the court feel a greater sense of self-confidence and assert themselves more. We're seeing evidence of that...
Sometimes O'Connor has teamed with Justices to her left, apparently because a case involved two competing principles that both appealed to her as a conservative. In March, for instance, weighing the demands of military authority against the exercise of religious belief, she rejected Rehnquist's majority opinion that the Air Force could enforce a dress code prohibiting religious headgear, in this case a yarmulke. Says Bruce Fein of the American Enterprise Institute: "She just wanted a little more military justification." On the same day, her close attention to procedural correctness led to another disappointment for conservatives...
...forays into unexpected territory do not, however, represent a lunge across the political spectrum. "There is no possibility of her being anything other than a Reagan conservative," says John Frank, a Phoenix lawyer who has closely followed O'Connor's career. "The Administration knew what it wanted + and got it." But O'Connor's growing assurance as a Justice means that conservatives cannot confidently presume a three-vote base on which to start building a majority result...