Justice in the Balance

SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR

How the First Woman on the Supreme Court

Became Its Most Influential Justice

By Joan Biskupic

Ecco. 419 pp. $26.95

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was supposed to be enjoying this Christmas as her first in retirement after an illustrious quarter-century of service on the nation's highest court. But with John G. Roberts Jr. now chief justice, Harriet Miers still White House counsel and Samuel A. Alito Jr. awaiting Senate hearings in January, O'Connor continues to sit on the court, asking her usual precise and well-prepared questions of advocates, writing her usual clear and straightforward opinions and, in short, performing one last coda to one of the most remarkable judicial performances in the history of the Supreme Court.

With celebrations, tributes and toasts to O'Connor on indefinite hold, Joan Biskupic's biography is a most welcome prelude. This highly readable and engaging work is not an authorized biography; O'Connor is among the justices most committed to keeping the court's inner deliberations secret and has opposed the early release of justices' papers to the public. Unable to rely on interviews with the justice herself, Biskupic, a lawyer who covers the Supreme Court for USA Today (and used to do so for this newspaper), has painstakingly researched her subject by interviewing family members and former clerks and mining the personal papers of other justices, notably those of Thurgood Marshall and Harry A. Blackmun.

What emerges is a powerful and persuasive account of O'Connor as the most astute political leader on the court since Justice William J. Brennan, the elfin Irishman from New Jersey who was the intellectual fulcrum of the Warren Court in the 1960s. Brennan famously quipped that the most important skill for any justice on the nine-member court was "counting to five." O'Connor, Biskupic tells us, has been a genius at this kind of math for more than two decades.

The origins of O'Connor's extraordinary tenure are told briskly. The childhood of the only Supreme Court justice ever inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame was spent largely on the Lazy B Ranch in Arizona, a place where women had presumptive equality because there was so much work to do. Her father was taciturn and demanding; when a teenage Sandra Day had a flat tire while driving lunch to the ranch hands, she fixed it herself and got there anyway -- only to be reprimanded by him for being late. Years later, when reporters sought comment on his daughter's ascension to the court, he continued to pore over his ranch ledgers and told them, "I'm Harry Day, and I'm busy."

O'Connor's big academic break was attending Stanford University, as her father had wished to do. She was a superb student, entering at age 16, finishing a bachelor's degree and a law degree in a mere six years and graduating near the top of the same Stanford Law School class of 1952 as the future Chief Justice Rehnquist. She was one of only a handful of women but a robust and fearless participant in class discussions. Over cite-checking for the Stanford Law Review, she met and fell in love with her fellow law student John O'Connor, whom she soon married.

While Rehnquist rocketed to a Supreme Court clerkship after Stanford, his future colleague on the court faced blunt sex discrimination at the bar; law firms, O'Connor later recounted, would consider her as a secretary but not a lawyer, with one even asking her if she typed. O'Connor's response was resourcefulness and resilience. She talked her way into a job in a local prosecutor's office. She worked as a government lawyer when her husband was stationed in Germany serving in the Judge Advocate General Corps. She opened a storefront law office in a shopping center when she and her husband settled back in Phoenix. Biskupic repeatedly cites her "no-nonsense, no-pity" mantra: "That's the way it is. . . . Deal with it."