The Power Broker

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O'Connor's aversion to drawing bright lines in Supreme Court decisions made her vulnerable to the argument that she forced constant changes in the law and guaranteed that nothing would ever be settled. "You had to go back to the court every time you wanted to change public policy," says John Yoo, a former Deputy Attorney General under the current President Bush and now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Instead of setting out broad principles that determined cases once and for all--and thus allowing Congress and state legislatures to move on--the incremental approach adopted by O'Connor forced litigants and legislative bodies to constantly go back to the court for their next set of orders. Yoo argues that made the high court a de facto chief administrator. "It sucked [decisions] away from the political process," he says. "And that has the effect of concentrating power in the Supreme Court."

But for all the heartbreak O'Connor caused on both sides of the ideological divide, she left court watchers impressed with her energy and self-discipline. The year George Mason University law professor Nelson Lund clerked for O'Connor, she underwent an operation for breast cancer. "The day after surgery," he recalls, "she called me from the hospital to talk about cases." She didn't miss hearing a single oral argument, although chemotherapy left her looking worn and exhausted.

O'Connor, an avid golfer and tennis player, also started an aerobics class for clerks and staff members in the Supreme Court's basketball court, which is one floor up from where the Justices hear arguments (the clerks refer to it as "the highest court in the land"). She also started an early-morning yoga class.

During especially intense periods on the court, when clerks worked all weekend, O'Connor was right there with them. She brought food she had cooked to help sustain her team as it worked round the clock. Says a former clerk: "I don't think too many of the others were doing that." O'Connor also was known for keeping everyone up to date on news of her grandchildren. "Oh, we'd hear about them all the time," a former staff member says with a laugh. "She loves those grandkids."

Now O'Connor will have much more time to spend with them, and with her ailing husband--and from her clerks' point of view, stepping down from her position of power to take care of her family won't require enormous adjustment in some ways. "She's like your best friend's grandmother," says former clerk Anup Malani, now an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. "So nice, and she makes you feel comfortable." It was a generous touch in someone who had the power to change the law of the land. --With reporting by Maggie Sieger/ Chicago, Kristina Dell/New York, Douglas Waller/ Washington and David Schwartz/Phoenix