The Power Broker

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O'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 for free. Years later, she expressed the view that being the court's first woman didn't make much difference on its rulings. "A wise old woman and a wise old man are going to reach the same decision," she was fond of repeating.

O'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 and conservative Republican credentials. So despite vocal opposition during her confirmation hearings from abortion foes, who protested her opposition to Arizona laws that would have banned state funding of the procedure for poor women and that would have prohibited it at the University of Arizona hospital, she was confirmed unanimously.

It 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, part of the Violence Against Women Act and part of the Brady gun-control law. Conservatives have cheered this as a virtual revolution--although O'Connor, in keeping with her trademark case-by-case approach, has departed from an absolutist position at times. She was on the side of the plaintiff in Tennessee v. Lane, a 2004 decision upholding part of the Americans with Disabilities Act and requiring courtrooms to be accessible to those with physical disabilities. And most famously, she voted in 2000 to step into Florida's disputed presidential balloting and stop the recount, giving the election to George W. Bush. But she also wrote a scathing dissent in this term's medical-marijuana case, in which a majority of the Justices said that federal antidrug laws trump state efforts to let doctors prescribe marijuana.