O'Connor wielded power as the 'swing vote' on key issues

WASHINGTON — For the last decade of her 24-year Supreme Court career, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has been the most powerful American woman ever to hold public office — casting pivotal votes on such hotly contested matters as abortion, states' rights, the death penalty, government involvement with religion, and the rights of suspected terrorists.

The surprise announcement that O'Connor, the first female justice in Supreme Court history, will retire had Utahns singing the praises of the fiercely independent Arizona jurist — and partisans on both sides scrambling to establish battle lines in what is expected to be a fierce confirmation process for a replacement.

"Justice O'Connor has been one of the most influential justices in history," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who is the second-ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee that will debate her replacement to the high court. "She has been the pivotal fifth vote in so many important cases, on both sides of the equation. Justice O'Connor is highly respected, and deservedly so."

As a pragmatist on a bench filled with more predictable liberal and conservative purists, O'Connor wielded far more power than her official standing as one of nine justices because she often held the crucial swing vote, enabling her to pick which faction to shape into a majority on any given case.

"She was appointed to be a conservative, but then even more conservative justices got appointed, and the effect of this was to leave her right square in the middle of a Supreme Court whose composition has been unchanged for over 10 years now," said Richard Fallon a professor at Harvard Law School. "She made more important 5-to-4 decisions than any other justice over those 10 years."

Although O'Connor voted with conservatives more often than she did with liberals in those close decisions, her more liberal votes were often on cases representing the most incendiary issues of the day, from affirmative action to gay rights. Her power to decide the outcome was so sweeping that attorneys preparing to go before the court would craft their arguments with persuading her as their foremost goal.

"She is, in a sense, the most important person on the court," Hatch said. "She consistently swung between the left and right."

'Tests' and 'standards'