In the Center, Hers Was the Vote That Counted

When Justice Potter Stewart informed the White House in 1981 that he planned to retire, President Reagan asked aides for a list of possible replacements that included women. At the time, there were few women with significant experience on the bench, and not many of them were Republicans. O'Connor, then a little-known 51-year-old judge on Arizona's appeals court, filled the bill.

Though she had been active in the ill-fated 1964 presidential bid of Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) and she had been friends since law school with William H. Rehnquist, the conservative who would later sit next to her on the court, O'Connor was widely known in her home state as a middle-of-the-roader.

In fact, she was elevated to the court of appeals in 1979 by a Democratic governor, Bruce Babbitt.

In the Arizona Senate, she had voted against busing for school integration and opposed gun control. After the Supreme Court overturned state death penalty laws in 1972, O'Connor was a leader of an effort to write a new one for Arizona.

But she had also supported bilingual education, opposed state aid to private religious schools and was a strong advocate of the proposed federal Equal Rights Amendment.

On abortion, she had voted against a ban on state funds for abortions for poor women, and opposed a bill prohibiting abortions at the University of Arizona hospital. At the same time, she voted to give hospital personnel the right to refuse to participate in abortions.

Conservative warnings that this record made her an unreliable vote against Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that recognized a constitutional right to abortion, were outweighed by the historical impact of putting a woman on the court, and she won unanimous confirmation in the Senate.

O'Connor was surprised by her selection and, initially, daunted by the challenges of a court where she had never so much as witnessed an argument before her first day at work in October 1981.

"One of my most poignant memories in life was the day her commission was read to her in the presence of the president and the members of Congress and she put on her robe and ascended to the bench," said Theodore B. Olson, who argued many cases before O'Connor as a private lawyer and as solicitor general of the United States under President Bush.

But, characteristically for a woman who had overcome law firms' refusal to hire her after graduation from Stanford Law School in the early 1950s, she plunged into the work and quickly made a mark.

She became a close friend of Justice Lewis F. Powell, then a moderate conservative on the court who, three years before O'Connor's arrival, had tried to define a centrist answer to the bitterly disputed Bakke affirmative-action case, suggesting that racial quotas in university admissions were unconstitutional but that using race as a "plus factor" to help qualified minorities was not.

The hallmark of O'Connor's style was what University of Chicago law professor Cass R. Sunstein called "judicial minimalism." She would decide cases incrementally, making no more law than was necessary to deal with the particular set of facts before her.