Illustration by TIM SHEAFFER
Sandra Day O’Connor met me for lunch at her chambers within that white marble temple to justice, the Supreme Court Building, in Washington, D.C. I was unprepared for the informality and glamour of this mythic American woman. “Sandra,” she said, introducing herself warmly, adding the “Day O’Connor” almost, it seemed, as an afterthought. “So, come sit.”
Her delightful new book, Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court (published this month by Random House), gives the forbidding Court a human face, and Justice O’Connor, I would soon learn, could give it nothing less.
The FWOTSC, as she amusingly describes herself—First Woman On The Supreme Court—was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1930, and raised as a cowgirl on the family’s Lazy B Ranch,…