FRONT AND CENTER : ON A CHANGING SUPREME COURT, SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR HAS EMERGED AS A NEW POWER, ESPECIALLY ON THE ISSUE THAT WILL NOT GO AWAY: ABORTION

SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR WAS IN A CELEBRATOry mood. Her family had gathered for a Thanksgiving reunion at the Lazy B ranch in the southeastern New Mexico and Arizona desert--where, in the midst of coyotes, snakes and hot, killing winds, the Days have been running cattle for 112 years--and O’Connor could tally a long list of reasons to be thankful. Within a month she and her husband, John Jay, were to mark their 40th wedding anniversary. Her marriage with her law-school sweetheart, an accomplished corporate lawyer who pours out deliciously funny stories at the slightest excuse, was nothing short of inspirational, and they had successfully raised three sons into professional men. The rest of her family was in fine shape as well. The Lazy B was being cared for by her brother, Alan Day, who rides a quarter horse and oversees 2,000 profitable cattle on about 200,000 acres. The family’s political tradition--inaugurated by O’Connor’s own tenure in the Arizona Legislature--was being carried on by her sister, Ann Day, who last November had been elected to a second term in the Arizona Senate.

As for O’Connor herself, after nearly 12 years as an associate justice of the U.S Supreme Court, the first and only woman in her position, she had finally begun to come into her own, to live up to the premise that she is, arguably, the most powerful woman in the nation.

Yet at times over the Thanksgiving weekend, O’Connor fell into one of the funks that had become familiar to her family. The Lazy B, on the outskirts of modern life, is a sanctuary for her, a place she retreats to in order to get her bearings. And during this homecoming, she wrestled once more with a bedeviling fact: She is the one American woman who must define for all other American women the powers they have and don’t have when it comes to the riveting issue of abortion.

Alan Day says they’ve talked about it more than once. “Not the court cases--she never discusses those with us--but she needs to let someone know the sheer agony she’s gone though on the abortion question. She’s caught in the middle. It’s gruesome.”

On almost every other issue, personal and political, O’Connor’s thoughts usually run far below the surface. Years ago, she overcame any basic need to discuss what’s eating at her, even with her family. “You keep your problems to yourself, you don’t lose control--that’s the way we were raised,” says Ann Day.

Indeed, O’Connor is a woman of extraordinary resoluteness. In 1988, on the evening before she was to undergo a mastectomy for breast cancer, her schedule called for her to deliver a speech 200 miles from Washington. She made the seven-hour round trip by car, gave the speech, had the surgery, and, through a long period of recovery and treatment, did not miss a single day of work. She had chemotherapy on Friday afternoons, was low as a dog all weekend, then dragged herself to work on Monday mornings. Not until after the surgery did she tell her brother and sister of her cancer, and when she did, she was dry-eyed. “She never once cried on my shoulder,” says Alan Day.

Having grown up valuing coolness and self-containment, O’Connor has always hesitated to thrust herself to the fore or even to be the object of attention. Being at the center of the national controversy over abortion, then, is her worst nightmare; it is as if someone had designed a situation just to put her at a disadvantage, to negate the qualities she has exhibited all her life. Like it or not, she has become the keeper of a whole society’s dilemma, the lady with the scales in a battle magnified by seemingly unappeasable passions into Good versus Evil.

“She’s in a no-win situation. Half the people will hate her, no matter what she decides,” says her brother. “She dislikes it intensely that she can’t put the issue behind her, but it’s impossible. Every term there’s at least one case with some facet involving abortion.”

SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR HAS ACHIEVED A POSITION RIGHT AT THE CENTER OF the Supreme Court’s balance of power. Along with two other justices, Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter, she has formed a voting bloc of activist moderates who have carried the day on some of the most divisive, high-profile legal issues facing the country. Although a solid right-wing majority had been predicted after five appointments by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, the court has not fallen into line behind conservative Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. Instead, during the 1991-1992 term, every time O’Connor and her allies were in agreement, their moderating opinion prevailed. Their strength has been evident again during the current term and likely will be enhanced after Byron R. White retires in June. He will be replaced by President Clinton’s first appointee, a change expected to create a generally even division on the court of three conservatives (Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia), three liberals (Harry A. Blackmun, John Paul Stevens and, most likely, the newcomer) and O’Connor, Souter and Kennedy in the middle.

Centrists historically become the powerbrokers when the court is divided, and O’Connor is considered by most to be the leader of the latest centrist group. While her leadership derives largely from her greater seniority, her visibility and her nuanced approach to the law, the ironic fact is that it also derives from the one issue that so haunts her: the national obsession with abortion.

Last summer, in the bitterly disputed Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania vs. Casey case, O’Connor seemed to have shaken off years of internal doubts by, for the first time, clearly affirming a woman’s right to an abortion, albeit with some limitations. It looked to be a watershed moment for her and the court. Yet the Casey ruling did not begin to end the legal warring over abortion. No sooner did the court resume work last fall than a case involving a Mississippi abortion law came up for review.

Rachael Pine, a senior litigator with the Center for Reproductive Law & Policy in New York City, handled the appeal for Mississippi’s three abortion clinics. The Mississippi law required women seeking abortions to undergo a 24-hour waiting period. Pine hoped to argue in front of the nine Supreme Court justices that the statute was too restrictive--there were so few clinics in Mississippi that many women could barely afford to get to them, let alone come back twice.

To be quizzed one-on-one by each justice, in their free-form Socratic method, can be maddening and intimidating. The court being nothing if not courtly, with 203 years of rituals, attorneys must be on their best behavior, yet the justices themselves may treat an attorney as a dunce. O’Connor is a careful listener. She comes to the bench with her homework done, often carrying a sheet of prepared questions. To make matters more challenging, it’s difficult to predict her vote: O’Connor takes pride in starting each case with no preconceptions and must be repeatedly won over.

This time, because of her Roe vs. Wade affirmation, Pine felt it was reasonable to expect O’Connor to take her side. But on Dec. 7, Pine’s challenge to the Mississippi law collapsed when the justices announced they were declining to hear arguments. The Planned Parenthood vs. Casey decision had allowed for a waiting period; Mississippi’s would also stand.

Although the decision was handed down without comment and without an account of the voting, Pine could not help but believe that O’Connor, the foremost centrist, did not do as much for Pine’s cause as the Casey decision would have implied. “Maybe she’d like to go back to obscurity. Maybe she doesn’t want to keep the label of feminist, having labored so long to avoid it,” Pine says with a trace of bitterness. “Maybe it’s simply her nature to be unpredictable. Who knows?”

By the same token, one secret to O’Connor’s power on the court is her ability to avoid being pigeonholed. As long as she stays at the center, as long as her vote remains unpredictable, she also remains pivotal.

AT 8 A.M. ON A RECENT CLOUDY, WINTRY MORNING, O’CONNOR WORKED OUT with an hour of exercise in the gym of the Supreme Court building. She had organized the class for the court’s women employees when she first arrived from Arizona. It is off-limits to men. The male justices like their exercises, too, but they are nowhere near O’Connor’s league. Her enthusiasm for personal fitness embraces not only mornings of workouts but also weekends and summers of hiking, golf, tennis, skiing and fishing. She has gone white-water rafting with her law clerks on the wild Youghiogheny River in Pennsylvania and backpacked with her husband in New Zealand. She turned 63 a few weeks ago, and she is probably more active than any of her colleagues.

Just before 10 o’clock, following consultations with clerks in her office, O’Connor walked with quick, short steps to the grand, vaulted room where the justices hear oral arguments. She wore a dead-serious look, chin jutted out, eyes lit. It’s her look. Someone once told her there didn’t seem to be any Miller time with her, and she shrugged, yes, that’s the way she is.

Entering through the swish of crimson velvet drapes, O’Connor took a seat in a black leather chair studded with brass nails. She folded her hands on the famous angled Honduran mahogany bench; at her feet sat a green-and-white china spittoon. Although she is 5 foot 8, the back of her chair is still ridiculously high for her--but then, the entire room is architecturally Olympian. The room inevitably appears almost empty, open-air marble columns reaching up two stories.

First on the docket that morning was the case of a Nevada prisoner who claimed he had been condemned to a slow death by smoke inhalation because his cellmate was addicted to five packs a day. O’Connor took an immediate interest in the prisoner. An EPA report on the dangers of secondary cigarette smoke was in the news, and O’Connor said she was distressed by the idea of a man locked in an 8-by-10 cell being subjected to toxic fumes. She leaned forward inquisitively, her questions bespeaking concern. Her head bobbed in a funny rhythm, an old habit. She blew her nose gently; she was nursing a cold.

After the questioning went on for a while, it became apparent that the prisoner’s plight was no longer as dire as when he filed his lawsuit. The state of Nevada had transferred him, assigning him a less objectionable cellmate. As a matter of fact, the issue before the justices now was in the realm of theory, with nothing at stake except clarification of the parameters of the law. You could see this realization dawn on O’Connor. Blood rose in her cheeks. She pointed a finger. “I thought we usually avoided deciding tough constitutional issues if there is a factual, non-constitutional basis for deciding a case,” she said to the prisoner’s lawyer. Her tone was proper yet scolding and left no doubt that she thought her time was being wasted.

Unusual for an appellate jurist, O’Connor is rooted in the here and now, in details, not abstractions, certainly not in ideology or a single theory of constitutional interpretation. It’s taken a long time for her critics, liberals and conservatives alike, to realize she is fundamentally disposed toward taking neither side when there are competing ideological agendas, whether political or judicial. Her only trailblazing has been toward compromise.

“Her philosophy is to split the difference. Where other justices are attracted by bright lines, she is able to find the finest of distinctions,” says Kathleen M. Sullivan, a Harvard constitutional law professor.

Because O’Connor is a pioneer, because she carries the special burden of womanhood, each decision is doubly meaningful. Everything she has done and will ever do on the court is grist for historians studying the impact of women in the late 20th Century. From the day in 1981 when President Reagan announced her nomination, there was no escaping her place in history. She will be forever judged by how she handles the trick of fate that caused a super-macho President to appoint a woman justice, and by how, in particular, she handles the litigation most important to women.

Out the window of her chambers, O’Connor can see a brick house that probably went unnoticed by her predecessors. Since 1929, it has been the headquarters of the National Women’s Party. Soon after O’Connor discovered this, she began mentioning the house in public speeches. “It serves as a daily reminder to me,” she would say, “that less than 70 years ago, women had yet to obtain that most basic civil right, the right to vote.”

Yet O’Connor has won only a few hurrahs from leaders of the modern-day women’s movement. Helen Norton, a lawyer with the Women’s Legal Defense Fund, says, “As a role model, she’s meant a lot, but her record in jurisprudence is mixed.” Says Rachael Pine: “O’Connor has not evidenced any desire to have a real impact on the feminist agenda. Her basic attitude is wait and see, let things percolate, better to make no decision than to make the wrong decision.”

Ann Day calls her sister “a conciliator, a solutions person. Sandra believes there is no problem for which she can’t find a solution. When you grow up in the middle of nowhere, when you don’t have a phone to call for help, when the nearest town is 25 miles away, you learn to fix things by yourself.” Practical is how O’Connor has always thought of herself, too.

Yet many people assume that O’Connor’s restrained, 1950s-style can-do persona is a cover-up. When she is on the high bench, you can see the indelible cool, but underneath, you suspect, there must be fire.

ACCORDING TO O’CONNOR’S CURRENT FINANCIAL STATEMENT, SHE IS BY FAR the wealthiest of the justices, with a net worth between $1.7 million and $4.5 million (most of it earned by her husband). The two of them have a home in the fashionable suburb of Chevy Chase, and they are on the A list for Washington functions of the high and mighty. But it would be a mistake to assume O’Connor got to the court simply by rubbing shoulders in the right crowd. She had few of the bona fides of social privilege while she was growing up. How many rich socialites do you suppose used to live in a four-room adobe structure without running water and electricity? Or once caught a nap on a case of dynamite behind the back seat of an old rattletrap car? Or, by the age of 8, were out on the range branding cattle, riding horses, driving trucks and firing .22 rifles?

O’Connor’s father and mother, the late Harry and Ada Mae Day, were educated but frugal. Her father read in the bedroom by a bare bulb. Neighboring kids lived miles away, and there was little time to play anyway. With the onset of the Great Depression, ranch life on the Arizona desert put to the test the indomitability of the human spirit. “Most everyone who tried to make a go of it either went to an early grave or packed up and left,” says Alan Day.

Without a doubt, the imperative of O’Connor’s bloodlines was fending for yourself. Her maternal grandmother, Mamie Wilkey, riding with her own pioneer father, drove the horses at the head of a wagon train crossing the Sierra Madre. “Our grandmother was a woman ahead of her time. Her independence was legendary,” says Ann Day. For several years, while attending elementary and secondary school in El Paso, O’Connor boarded with Wilkey, whom she looked upon as “a second mother.” O’Connor’s mother was also a pioneer in her own right: a female college graduate in the 1920s.

On the Day side of the family, O’Connor’s grandfather, Henry Clay Day, was a Vermont Yankee who came west in the 1880s and homesteaded the Lazy B in the ancestral territory of the Chiricahua Apaches. It was O’Connor’s father, though, who seems to have most lastingly shaped her outlook on life. “From head to toe, he was filled with the spirit of the people who carved their place in the West,” says Alan Day. “Sandra was the apple of his eye, and the great lesson he taught us was you didn’t make excuses, you didn’t ask for someone to bail you out, you simply did the job yourself.”

The zest O’Connor demonstrates today for the outdoors and for hard work can be traced to the Lazy B. Hard work carried over during her formative professional career in Phoenix as a lawyer, a trial court judge, a three-term state senator and appeals court judge, not to mention as a mother, wife and civic leader--all of which eventually brought her to Reagan’s attention. He was fulfilling a campaign promise when he appointed O’Connor to the Supreme Court, and not a few of his most fervent followers on the New Right thought he was being, No. 1, foolish, and, No. 2, fooled .

A “radical feminist” is what Reagan unwittingly was foisting on the court, claimed Howard Phillips, director of the Conservative Caucus. Women had been denied equal access to law offices and the courts for so long, the New Right reasoning went, that the first woman to break the barrier must of necessity embody a potent, radical anger. Investigators who searched through the O’Connor files at Arizona newspaper morgues and the Statehouse, however, discovered a more contradictory public record.

As the first woman in the Arizona Senate, O’Connor had opposed the death penalty, but she also fought gun control; she favored the equal rights amendment, but she did not support school busing for racial integration. Throughout, she was known for getting a lot accomplished--she ultimately became the Senate majority leader--but by no stretch was she an activist.

At her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, New Right groups tried to turn Republicans against her, to no avail. The Old Right’s gray eminence, Barry Goldwater, escorted her to the witness table, and she handled her moment in the spotlight with predictable cool. Questioned about her pro-abortion-rights record in the Arizona Legislature, O’Connor defended her votes, saying, “My own view in the area of abortion is that I am opposed to it as a matter of birth control or otherwise.” However, she added, “I do not believe that, as a nominee, I can tell you how I might vote on a particular issue which may come before the court.”

Liberals, too, were suspicious of her record. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Georgetown law professor who was the first woman elected as the congressional delegate from Washington, D.C., says, “We had no reason to expect anything but the very minimum of O’Connor who, from all appearances, came here as a Goldwater conservative.” The liberals muted their criticisms, though, and O’Connor was confirmed by a lavish 99-0 count, with one absent. “It seemed self-evident a female O’Connor was preferable to a male counterpart of her,” Norton says with a shrug.

Everyone by then was familiar with the one dramatic, consciousness-raising moment from O’Connor’s past. It was 1952. She was 22, a new Stanford Law School graduate with perfect credentials, having sailed through higher learning in six years instead of seven, finishing with the third-best grade-point average. Confidently sending her resume on the rounds of California’s best law firms, she waited for replies. The pattern soon became clear. The sole job she would be offered was that of legal secretary.

Not that the insult tempted O’Connor to embrace a feminist agenda. In fact, after finally finding a job as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, she promptly quit in order to accompany her husband (you could almost hear the sighs-- How typical! --during the confirmation hearings) while he was overseas in the U.S. Army. Upon his discharge, John Jay O’Connor III, a San Francisco native who had ranked behind his wife in class standing at Stanford, easily landed a position with a top-drawer law firm in Phoenix, while Sandra Day O’Connor had to hang out a shingle in a back-street, two-person office.

If such realities bothered her, she didn’t let on when she got to Washington. The confirmation hearings passed without any real clue as to how deeply O’Connor felt about sexism, and, once on the court, she abided by the traditional strict limits on a justice’s public comments. She did no in-depth press interviews except for a mostly chatty one with the Saturday Evening Post, and she gave only a few mostly platitudinous and unrevealing speeches.

Then, in November of 1990, while delivering a women’s conference keynote speech in St. Louis, O’Connor suddenly got personal. It seemed she had never forgotten that original insult of her postgraduate days. It was preserved in a pocket of her soul. Not a deep pocket, either, because, as she recounted it, she had a stinger ready for the ears of Reagan’s attorney general, William French Smith, when he notified her of her nomination to the court: “Oh, I guess you must mean in a secretarial position!” She made it sound like a joke, but the point was that Smith had been a partner with Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher when that Los Angeles law firm turned her down 29 years earlier. However wry or lighthearted her tone, the rejoinder plainly sprang out of a vexation that had burned in her a long time.

During the St. Louis speech, O’Connor was as highly wrought as she’s ever been in public. To start with, she said, she was acutely conscious that “only a short time ago, the subject of this conference, ‘Women in Power,’ would have been an oxymoron.” Citing several statistics--94% of all law partners are men, for instance--she blamed the “paucity” of women in power positions on “blatant sex discrimination and the widespread belief that women are unfit” and concluded, in table-pounding language, that “we have a long way to go before women are on an equal footing with men.” She recalled a conversation in 1966 with a Denver attorney who mentioned that his firm was intent on hiring a black man, but when she inquired about a woman’s prospects, his response contained epic disdain: “We don’t expect to ever hire a woman lawyer. Our clients just would not accept them.”

It now turns out that when O’Connor was majority leader of the Arizona Senate, in the early 1970s, she undertook a low-key insurrection against the Arizona Bar Assn., which then had a rule on the books for systematically keeping women out of major law firms: Husbands and wives were prohibited from working at rival law firms to avoid a “conflict of interest” in any litigation. The practical result was that men were hired and their wives were not. Among prestigious male attorneys, the one most willing to fight against the bar’s board of governors was on the opposite side of the political fence from O’Connor. John P. Frank, who calls himself a member of the “liberal fringe” and who would later represent Anita Hill in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, worked with O’Connor to get the archaic rule repealed. “It was a good, hard fight with an element of risk. There was no guarantee we’d win. But Sandra did not flinch,” says Frank now.

In public, O’Connor would not have been mistaken for a Type A politician. She felt compelled to “act feminine,” she has said. Even so, says Frank, “she sent a message to the board of governors she was willing to use her clout, to roll them over.”

In her earliest years on the Supreme Court, however, the messages O’Connor would send would be decidedly less pushy. She was considered, as Time magazine put it, a “reasonably dependable third vote for the . . . conservative wing.” She joined them in her first abortion vote, for example, but she did break ranks, notably on issues of sex discrimination. In her first term, she wrote a 5-4 opinion ordering the nursing school of a public university to accept male students.

In all, O’Connor’s quiet, detailed and predominantly conservative mien brought her contentiously mixed reviews from her natural constituency. In 1984, when the New York Women’s Bar Assn. chose O’Connor for its President’s Special Award on Justice, there was a backlash from 60 lawyers and law professors who signed a letter calling the choice “incomprehensible and extremely disturbing.” The signatories cited her “hostility to reproductive freedom and meaningful remedies for civil rights violation. As women attorneys,” they wrote, “we must not give legitimacy to token appointees who undermine our goals.”

FROM O’CONNOR’S FIRST days on the high court, stacks of handwritten letters came to her desk, outpourings from women gratified to see one of their own attain power. At first, the mail tended to be congratulatory and spontaneous, but as time passed, it bore the marks of an organized lobbying effort, complete with threatening undertone. Activists on both sides of the abortion issue, stamping and sealing quantities of letters every day, had designated her as their vote on the court, and they all admonished her to be faithful to her sex. The woman in her should recognize the cry for free will, shouldn’t she? The mother in her should treasure the unborn, shouldn’t she? The Roe vs. Wade precedent of 1973, establishing a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, had been under steady attack in state legislatures and lower courts. Inexorably, constitutional questions worked their way to the court. Dozens of abortion issues were brought before the high bench in the 1980s, and the justices selected several for deliberation.

The chance to rule on the judicial issue of her era, which another female jurist might have used to put her stamp on the court, instead seemed to place O’Connor on the horns of a dilemma.

On the one hand, she could not find a strong basis in the law to uphold Roe vs. Wade. In a 1983 dissent, in a case addressing abortion restrictions, she wrote a laborious criticism of the constitutional shortcomings of Roe, and later she introduced the idea that unless they were “unduly burdensome,” abortion restrictions could stand. On the other hand, she never wrote or signed an opinion supporting outright reversal of Roe vs. Wade. By hewing closely to the narrow issues of each case, she avoided a confrontation with the fundamental legal question--is the right to terminate a pregnancy included in the scope of privacy guaranteed by the Constitution? The result of her votes was that, while she helped to undermine Roe’s legal underpinnings, she also helped keep it alive.

Twice a year, O’Connor’s letter writers and their friends would materialize in a chanting, protesting show of placards, hoping, among other things, to shift the lone female justice out of neutral. In the third week of January, on the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, it was the turn of the “anti” crowd; in April, the “pro” crowd turned out. One of the annual rallying calls, billed as the March for Women’s Lives, neared a record for political rally attendance by drawing upwards of 500,000 Americans on April 6, 1992.

None other than Justice Harry A. Blackmun, the author of Roe vs. Wade, seemed to endorse the notion that O’Connor could be persuaded. Blackmun had himself undergone a conversion to liberalism after being appointed to the court by President Richard M. Nixon. Throughout the 20 years since abortion was legalized, Blackmun has tried to hold together a majority for his embattled precedent. Early in O’Connor’s tenure, Blackmun issued this assessment of her: “Sandra’s tough. She’s conservative.” But he believed an appeal to her feminine, and he hoped feminist, self would succeed. “The soft spots in her armor,” he said, “are women and children.”

While Blackmun’s viewpoint was widely held, others at the court thought it missed the mark. Michael Rips, a clerk in the mid-1980s for Justice William J. Brennan Jr., the liberal icon, came to believe O’Connor was operating at a level beyond emotional and sexual partisanship. “It’s totally sexist to think that because O’Connor is a woman she’s got a soft spot. It’s simplistic. And it’s wrong,” says Rips, now a Manhattan appellate attorney. “I started out with no opinion of her either way, but I became a great admirer of her open-mindedness.”

According to those who see O’Connor in this light, she possesses the greatest of all jurist’s gifts, an unending desire to seek a fair, just solution, and it is irrelevant whether or not this flows from two X chromosomes. Stephen Gilles, a University of Chicago law professor who clerked for O’Connor, describes her as having “superior access to the phenomenon of being a woman, but her gender is not the prevailing factor with her. She is someone who thinks long and hard on where to come down in every single case. Obviously,” he adds, “she was aware that millions of women had a laser beam focused on her in the abortion cases, but she is not someone who can be intimidated.”

The noisome letter writers and demonstrators inflicted a psychic battering on O’Connor--her family says that as the pressure built, so did her resentment of it--but, except in private moments, she refused to react emotionally. Instead, O’Connor tried by long hours of hard work to find her own solution, as has been her wont since childhood. In her early 40s, when she decided to learn the game of golf, she hit buckets of balls Saturday after Saturday for four years before ever attempting to play nine holes. After her cancer surgery, rumors flew that she would resign or at least slacken her pace. “Out of the question,” says Ann Day. “No one at the court works harder and gets more mileage out of a day than she does,” says Gilles.

Rips remembers O’Connor beating him to the stacks at the Supreme Court library. “I don’t mean the books were checked out by her clerks. I mean they were checked out by O’Connor herself, which is unheard of,” he says. “The justices themselves generally do not take a personal hand in the primary research. Either they are not inquisitive enough, or they already have their minds made up.”

But, when it came to abortion, many observers of the court wondered whether O’Connor was trying to find wisdom in the law books or merely a new way to finesse the issue.

IN THE 1991-92 TERM, FOR the eighth time in 10 years, the court agreed to decide a major abortion case. The question was whether the state of Pennsylvania could impose a set of five qualifying tests on a woman in advance of an abortion, most notably that wives must talk first with their husbands. The plaintiff was the Planned Parenthood chapter of southeastern Pennsylvania, and the named defendant was the state’s governor, Bob Casey. The real defendant, though, was Roe vs. Wade.

During the head counting that went on beforehand, Blackmun appeared to be far short of a majority; two stalwarts of abortion rights, Brennan and Thurgood S. Marshall, had retired in 1990 and 1991. On the other side, Chief Justice Rehnquist, long awaiting an opportunity to overturn Blackmun’s landmark, presumably had only to look to the new Bush appointees--Souter and Thomas--in order to muster a conservative majority.

Once upon a time, Rehnquist would have automatically counted on O’Connor. They had been classmates at Stanford and had reached the court in parallel fashion via the Arizona judiciary, she always in the role of protege. The Washington press corps, upon her appointment, portrayed her as a malleable version of an intellectually superior Rehnquist. The prediction was that O’Connor would fall into line behind Rehnquist nine times out of 10, and, while that proved to be the case at first, she bristled at references to the “Arizona twins” and quietly asserted her differences with him.

“It was clear from the beginning that Sandra was her own person. She simply wasn’t a parrot of Rehnquist and wouldn’t be pushed around by him,” Rips says.

By the mid-’80s, her growing independence was clear outside as well as inside the court. “In certain areas,” Blackmun told a meeting of federal judges in 1985, “she is becoming her own woman.” She had moved away from Rehnquist and strict conservatism, especially on some big, ideological issues like gender discrimination, free speech and, of course, abortion. In 1989, no less than the general counsel of Planned Parenthood, Eve Paul, said, “Justice O’Connor has been quite good on women’s issues. She has shown a certain sensitivity.”

On Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, Rehnquist could not count on O’Connor. At the same time, Blackmun could hardly assume she was in his corner. Her criticism of Roe vs. Wade had pointed out a quandary left unresolved in his 1973 opinion. He had interpreted the medical knowledge of the time to mean a fetus aborted within 24 weeks of conception could not be a living being. O’Connor, however, argued that his timeline was no longer valid, that no timeline would work. Because of medical advances, an abortion at 22 weeks or 20 weeks or perhaps even earlier might inadvertently place a breathing, kicking baby in the hands of doctors, forcing an on-the-spot decision between administering a kind of coup de grace or rushing about trying to save a tiny life. O’Connor had written that Roe vs. Wade was “on a collision course with itself.”

On June 29, 1992, the court’s decision in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey was announced, and with it O’Connor finally confronted the broad constitutional question. With Souter and Kennedy, she wrote an opinion affirming the “central holding” of Roe vs. Wade--that the Constitution grants women the personal liberty to terminate a pregnancy. A pregnant woman, she read aloud from the bench, “is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the state to insist . . . upon its own vision of the woman’s role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture.”

Of the five Pennsylvania restrictions, O’Connor sided with the majority to strike down the one mandating that married women seek approval from their men. It was the rule feminists found most objectionable, and O’Connor’s decision pleased Rachael Pine tremendously. “You hear people say, ‘Gee, why shouldn’t women tell their husbands?’ But O’Connor had the good sense to realize many men, in reality, would wield veto power over their wives,” Pine says. “This is O’Connor’s particular sensitivity, the age-old perception of women as property, as extensions of their husbands. On this point she is very clear: The day of ‘Me Tarzan, You Jane’ must end.”

Having laid out the fundamentals to a woman’s right of choice in the signed opinion, O’Connor proceeded to narrow it by permitting the other four Pennsylvania rules--including a waiting period and parental consent for teens--to stand. These rules, she concluded, did not constitute an “undue burden” on a woman because they did not effectively thwart her ability to choose. Perhaps not surprisingly, O’Connor was still trying to have it both ways, but the result nonetheless was historic. Her skillful approximation of a Solomon-like decision enabled her to build consensus with Kennedy and Souter, thus achieving a majority for Blackmun and sustaining Roe vs. Wade into the foreseeable future.

The majority ruling was a patchwork of three opinions. Blackmun wrote an opinion with no modifications of Roe vs. Wade; Stevens wrote a separate concurring opinion; the victorious O’Connor-Kennedy-Souter collaboration added the “undue burden” standard as the new law of the land. Against the five of them, Rehnquist lost his own chance to make history. Bannered in headlines, the Planned Parenthood ruling had to rankle O’Connor’s former mentor. “Here was clear evidence Rehnquist does not dominate this court,” says Sullivan. “Here was O’Connor sitting in the catbird’s seat.”

FOR A LONG TIME, O’CONNOR was the loner, the independent on the court. “I was never one of the boys,” she has said about her time in the Arizona Legislature, and the same was true in Washington. For a long time, she was not inclined to mingle. During the breakfast and lunch hours, while the other justices talked shop in groups of two or three, she would eat alone at her desk.

Only by happenstance did she find a key to loosening up around the men: It was her brother’s homemade beef jerky from the Lazy B. A few years ago, O’Connor began a tradition of giving her colleagues gift-wrapped packages of the jerky, air-expressed to Washington around the time of the Christmas holidays. Distribution day involves a rare moment of fun: the justices acting loose, some munching experimentally and bantering lightly, and O’Connor, for once, at the heart of the goings-on.

A few years ago, it would have seemed foolhardy to predict that O’Connor would be remembered in future textbooks for much of anything beyond the quaintness of her gender. But because of the shifting alliances of the court as well as her own judicial temperament, O’Connor is carving a substantive place in history.

It is the center, now, that makes news: “Conservatives Were Picked, but the Court Stays Centered,” read one 1992 headline. O’Connor with Souter and Kennedy often carry the day on behalf of moderation--the hands-off judicial attitude that tends to keep precedents in place and curb court activism. For instance, in 1992, they anchored a 5-4 decision that continued the court’s ban of prayer in public schools; they agreed to give wider latitude to leafletting at airports, and they were instrumental in blocking Rehnquist when he tried to turn over to state courts a larger share of lawsuits filed by prisoners.

“I am not surprised one whit to see O’Connor finding her own voice and attacking conservative positions,” says Rips. “I used to tell people she would one day be the dynamic center of the court. They would argue with me, but you’re seeing it now.”

Certainly, O’Connor’s influence should not be oversold. On Jan. 13, in Bray vs. the Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, the most recent abortion case the court has heard, the court ruled that an 1871 civil rights law does not entitle women to sue protesters who harass them at abortion clinics. O’Connor cast her vote in opposition to Rehnquist but ended up in a 6-3 minority.

Nor should there be any confusion that O’Connor has been transformed into a liberal or a feminist. Nothing in her biography has changed. Mother, wife, civic leader and careerist, she has never been committed to anything but her own careful approach to every issue, case by case. The new O’Connor only underscores the old O’Connor.

The difference is that O’Connor is no longer the “opaque figure” described in a 1989 Washington Post article; she is no longer the jurist of the 1980s said by the American Lawyer to invite “a range of labels.” She has been revealed. The mathematics of the current court have shown her to be essentially the judicial traditionalist she has really always been.

“She’s carrying on a tradition that goes back to Oliver Wendell Holmes, who also said everything is a matter of degree,” says Sullivan.

Thurgood Marshall, the opposite of a traditionalist, said of O’Connor, “History will judge all of us, and Sandra will do a lot better by history than most of us.” Of all her colleagues, the loquacious, storytelling Marshall was, ironically, the easiest company for O’Connor, who found heself, shortly before his death in January, wishing to hear “just once more, another story that would, by and by, perhaps change the way I see the world,” she told a reporter.

O’Connor is forgiven by many of her critics because she cultivates such an open mind and because she tries so hard to play fair within the confines of the law. Says Rachael Pine: “If we could have a court full of O’Connors, nine justices who don’t give you a knee-jerk response but who try to calculate the truth as they find it, then you could say the system is working the way it is supposed to work.”