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But if O'Connor's own intellectual gifts are widely praised, the self-assured woman, who is of medium height and wears such sensible clothes as suits with silk blouses and matching ascots, is neither dull company nor dour. "She never forgets she's a lady—and she'll never let you forget," says Attorney McGowan. Yet Stanford Vice President Joel P. Smith recalls her as "the best dancer I've ever danced with" when he knew her as a member of the Stanford Board of Trustees. She does a nifty two-step and enjoys country music. A superb cook specializing in Mexican dishes, she, along with her husband, is a popular partygiver and -goer. While the prosperous Phoenix lawyer regales guests with Irish jokes told in a brogue, she jumps in to lift stories along, without ever stepping on the punch lines.
She golfs weekly (her handicap is 18), plays an average game of tennis and, typically, works intensely at both.
It is that striving for perfection that most impresses acquaintances. When she and John helped complete their lavish home in suburban Paradise Valley, where houses cost $500,000 or more, one friend was amazed to find them both soaking adobe bricks in coat after coat of milk. "It's an old technique," O'Connor explained. "But I don't know why you use skim and not homogenized milk." Her father, who is 83, jokes about her diligence. "She's so damned conscientious," he says, "she wouldn't even give me a legal opinion. As a judge she can't, so she refers me to her husband." Still, her mother sees a humility in Sandra, despite her accomplishments, explaining, "She isn't the type who would try to high-hat anyone." A friend recalls an example. When O'Connor was president of Heard Indian Museum, which holds an annual and overcrowded handcraft sale, her son Scott wanted one item badly but had broken his leg in a skiing accident. Instead of using her clout to bypass a long line of buyers, his mother spent several hours sitting on a camp stool to await her turn.
How will O'Connor's appointment, assuming she is confirmed, affect the decisions of the high court? The security of lifetime tenure can liberate Justices to see themselves in a new perspective, unencumbered by the pressures of climbing toward the top. They are there. Justices have often confounded the Presidents who appointed them with unpredictable decisions. After Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled against Teddy Roosevelt in a key antitrust case, the President, who had appointed Holmes, fumed: "I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that." Said Dwight Eisenhower about his selection of Earl Warren: "The worst damn fool mistake I ever made." Harry Blackmun stunned Richard Nixon by writing the court's majority opinion in Roe vs. Wade (1973), the decision that legalized abortion.
Based on what little they know about O'Connor, legal scholars expect her to fit in neatly with a court that is sharply split in philosophy, tends to analyze each case on strictly legal merits, and has pioneered only in selected areas of the law. A Justice Department official says approvingly of O'Connor: "She is not leaping out to overrule trial court judges or state lawyers or to craft novel theories. Her opinions are sensible and scholarly."