A defining characteristic of the first black female chief justice in the country is that she hardly hides behind her robe.

Whether swearing in the mayor of a historic black town, writing about her relationship with her teenage daughter, or choosing a female bodyguard, Leah Ward Sears often lays out her private life for public display.

What's more, the woman who last week took the gavel of Georgia's Supreme Court is always ready for opportunities to promote her broader philosophies and support causes, such as encouraging people to get and stay married.

On one level, Ms. Sears's rise to Georgia's highest court is a redeeming tale of post-civil rights America. Yet her career, which has included its share of controversy, has also served as a reminder of the political sensitivities rippling through the nation about judges.

As recently as last year, she faced a tough reelection to the Georgia Supreme Court, opposed by conservatives who thought she was too much of a liberal activist. Now, as head of the court she would have had to vacate, she is keenly aware of the growing intersection of politics and the judiciary - and, characteristically, has some thoughts about it.

"I understand that a judge has a record and that we're not computers that you put things into and you get these plain answers," Sears said in an interview from her chambers in Atlanta last week. "But we need to back off of judges a little bit.... If the judiciary had been a rank political branch, there would never have been Brown v. Board of Education, and I wouldn't be sitting here."

Born as an Army brat in Heidelberg, Germany, Sears circled the globe twice and had seen the Parthenon before her parents settled in Savannah. The muggy Southern port is also where US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas grew up as the son of a crab cannery worker.

She memorized Plessy v. Ferguson by the time she was 6, and by her next birthday she had already determined she wanted to be a judge, inspired by Constance Baker Motley, the first black woman to sit on the federal judiciary.

When she came to the US in the early 1960s, she asked her parents, as they drove through Harlem, why blacks and whites lived in different neighborhoods. She still remembers the poignant silence from the front seat.

Though too young to take part in the civil rights movement, Sears certainly fed off its fire. She was driven not just personally, but by a deep desire to involve minorities as participants in the justice system - a dream she plans to put into action as chief justice by chairing a special commission to increase access to the civil justice system by the poor and working classes.

Still, she insists she is not what her opponents accuse her of being: an activist judge. Last fall Sears, a remarried divorcée with two children who describes herself as a "moderate with a progressive streak," became the target of a concerted effort by Republicans to unseat her.

She ran against conservative judge Grant Brantley. For her, it was a painful, sometimes vicious, election, but one that she won handily. The decisive victory was notable in a state like Georgia, which has tilted increasingly conservative in recent years. "They tried to paint Leah as an ultra left-wing liberal, but the paint didn't stick," says state Rep. Tyrone Brooks.

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