Law: Establishing Her Independence

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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. In a 5-to-4 decision involving the legitimacy of a voluntary-school-prayer group in Pennsylvania, O'Connor joined with liberals to hold that the court could not examine the issues because the school-board member who appealed the case had no legal standing to do so.

Her 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.