The Justice of Citizenship
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor asked some of the biggest questions confronting
America during her twenty-five years on the United States Supreme Court.
Though she had been retired for several years, she still kept an office deep inside
the massive neoclassical building. Justice O’Connor was in her eighties. A cane
leaned against her desk. But her voice was strong and clear as she rose without
effort to greet me.
We weren’t there to discuss her opinions in some of the most significant
cases in American history—not
Bush v. Gore, when the Court (with her crucial
vote) picked a president; nor
Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when she sided with
the liberal justices upholding
Roe v. Wade. “I don’t look back,” she told me
definitively. “That’s for a historian or a book writer. I did the best I could and
that’s that.”
We were there to talk instead about her initiative to teach young people
about the important questions of government and citizenship. Sitting in her
cavernous office, wrapped with shelves heavy with books on law and
government, it was impossible not to feel the weight of history and the great
debates that had defined America. The American experience, Justice O’Connor
explained, was built on defining questions.
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