Justice O’Connor’s art of compromise

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, rebranded late in her career as Notorious RBG, has been getting all the love due to a pioneering woman Supreme Court justice.

But her colleague Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who announced Tuesday that she is stepping out of public life at age 88 because of creeping dementia, is just as important in the history of the Constitution. It’s worth celebrating O’Connor’s extraordinary career now, while she is able to appreciate our appreciation.

O’Connor has always emphasized her Arizona upbringing on her parents’ cattle ranch. Even her announcement Tuesday included the comment that “as a young cowgirl from the Arizona desert, I never could have imagined that one day I would become the first woman justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.”

No doubt learning to ride and shoot left O’Connor strong and independent minded. But she was also whip-smart, by her own account finishing third in her class at Stanford Law School, just behind future Justice William H. Rehnquist.

Probably the most significant part of O’Connor’s early career was her service in the Arizona Senate, where she quickly was elected Republican majority leader. She turned out to be a skilled negotiator, with extraordinary antennae for detecting the middle position on which compromise could be reached—a harbinger of her unique judicial approach.

Her influence was a compromising, moderate centrism. On issue after issue, O’Connor crafted decisions that fell between the bold rights-expansion of the Warren court liberals and the aggressive, activist rolling-back favored by the swashbuckling conservatives led by Justice Antonin Scalia.

Court watchers tend to emphasize the contributions of Justice David Souter, whose philosophy was reflected in the part of the opinion featuring respect for precedent, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, who contributed the philosophical defense of a woman’s autonomy.

But the whole idea of crafting a jointly signed opinion would have been inconceivable without O’Connor. It was a major step away from the cult of the individual justice.

It’s no surprise that O’Connor devoted herself to civics education after her retirement from the court. She always believed that citizenship demanded compromise and mutual respect. Those are in short supply. We are going to have to learn to appreciate Justice O’Connor’s contributions through the lens of our current polarization.