The imprint that O'Connor leaves on the high court

In 1981, when Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman appointed to the US Supreme Court, she was by no means the most qualified individual in the country for the job.

She was not a partner in a major law firm. She had never clerked for a Supreme Court justice. She had never argued a case or even attended a session at the high court. Nor had she served as a federal trial judge or federal appeals court judge.

It wasn't that Ms. O'Connor lacked the competence or intelligence to have performed all those jobs: She graduated third in her class at Stanford Law School. But in the 1950s, the law belonged to men, and those who pulled the levers of power could not see beyond O'Connor's gender.

She was discouraged. But she never quit.

As her 24-year Supreme Court career demonstrates, Justice O'Connor, who announced her retirement last Friday, had other qualifications that helped mold and prepare her to become one of the most influential and important figures in American law.

Now, as she plans to leave the court upon confirmation of a successor, scholars, historians, and some of her own former clerks are assessing her place in history.

O'Connor helped break down gender stereotypes and open doors for women in legal and other professions. But perhaps more important, she quickly moved past the "first woman" label and became a centrist leader on the court.

"When you become the first sister in a group of brethren, I think it had to have been a difficult beginning," says RonNell Andersen Jones, who clerked for O'Connor during the 2003-04 term. But she says O'Connor soldiered through by focusing on her role as a justice.

"She genuinely thought of herself as one of nine members of the court - as a person who had a job to do and one vote to cast."

Charles Blanchard, a lawyer in Phoenix who clerked for O'Connor in 1986-87, agrees. "Her real accomplishment in opening doors for women is not that she was the first woman Supreme Court justice, but that she so quickly transcended that," he says.

"She didn't decide issues for women from a woman's perspective," adds Marci Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law in New York and a 1989-90 O'Connor clerk. "She was always an independent-minded, strong-willed individual who made decisions based on her own internal moral compass."

She also says, "That is a wonderful role model for anybody, but also for women moving up the ranks."

O'Connor's vote has often been decisive.

She is sometimes referred to as the most powerful woman in America because of her role as a key swing voter on the sharply divided court. When the court divides 4-4 on a hot-button issue, O'Connor frequently breaks the deadlock, and the resulting law mirrors her view of how the matter should be resolved.

The power of her position has been closely watched in part because of a single issue: abortion. O'Connor seemed poised to overturn the Roe v. Wade precedent in the early 1980s just after she joined the court. But she later helped preserve Roe's essential holding in 1992 by joining forces at the center of the court with Justices David Souter and Anthony Kennedy.

In a string of other cases, she has exercised similar power to shift the direction of the law - sometimes by wielding a single vote.

Her influence was evident in 2000 when her vote tipped the balance in striking down a ban on so-called "partial-birth" abortions, and in 2003 when she provided the crucial fifth vote to uphold the constitutionality of affirmative action in university admissions.

In 2004, she was once again in the driver's seat at the center of the court, writing that American citizens detained as enemy combatants in the war on terror must be provided a level of due process in the civilian courts. "A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens," she wrote.

On the conservative side, her vote has been crucial to the conservative wing's federalism revival and in upholding school vouchers in 2002. She also joined her conservative colleagues in Bush v. Gore, voting in December 2000 to halt the Florida recount in the presidential election.

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