First woman Supreme Court judge

When, over a hundred years ago, Mark Twain was banging around the West – Nevada and California mainly – as a young and sassy journalist, he found, like all reporters who write every day, that not every day do stories appear that will taste juicy to the newspaper reader.

For every fire or shooting or case of corruption in high places, there's a horse sale or a false eviction case or a stupefyingly dull wrangle in the town council about floating a bond for a new school. The journalist's job, Mark Twain concluded, is to attract people to read something they're not interested in and if, along the way, you can also tell the truth, so much the better.

One of the ways we do this, when we're nagged by the knowledge that we're writing about something essentially dull, is to use adjectives that hope to bait you into believing the story is much more exciting than appears on the surface. 'Intriguing' was an old favourite where no intrigue was involved. Today, we could barely get by without using 'heartbreaking' for homeless children, 'spell-binding' for noisy orators, 'thunderous' for silences and 'awesome' for almost any serious decision that the president has to make.

I remember once – indeed, for the first time – standing before the really 'awesome', the apocalyptic sight of the Grand Canyon; a few feet away was a pretty teenager. She gazed at it in, I guess, awe and said, 'I think it's cute'. I take it she never became a journalist.

From time to time, something comes along that allows us to reach for the word 'historic'. Every day in the United States' Senate, some senator's going to use the word about a law that he very much wants to see passed. Well, for once, something quite truly historic happened in Washington.

Last Tuesday, the committee of the Senate that quizzes and passes on all presidential appointments to the judiciary branch of government voted by 17 to one – the one didn't vote against, he abstained in the usual formal way by voting present – voted to approve President Reagan's nomination of the first woman ever to be named to be one of the nine judges of the United States' Supreme Court. Her confirmation by the full Senate is a sure as the rising of the sun. Not a paper or a magazine or a television commentator had to hesitate to pronounce this novelty 'awesome', 'historic' or as Time said, 'a stunning break with tradition'.

The Supreme Court is the protector of the individual citizen, the final court of appeal for anyone who believes his rights have been violated under the constitution. Its job is not, as foreigners often believe, to adjudicate between the laws of the states and the laws of the federal government. The constitution, in fact, leaves to each state certain prime powers of law-making. The Supreme Court is there to say, in the end, whether or not some individual has had his or her freedoms violated as they're laid down in the constitution, which can be interpreted to cover practically any grievance you can think of in the interests of fair play, fair trade, fair profit, free speech, racial injustice, unfair arrest.

In our time, the court has said in – I weigh my words – historic decisions that child labour is unconstitutional, that blacks must have equal rights in schooling, that an undertaker cannot hold shares in an insurance company, that a suspected criminal, no matter how shocking his offence, cannot be brought to trial unless his rights were recited to him in the moment of arrest. That a bus company has no right to subject objecting riders to music being played over a loudspeaker, that the federal government should provide money for anyone who wants an abortion (this is coming up for revision), that a given law of a city, of a state, of a county, of the Congress, can be struck down because it violates the rights of some American citizen.

Recently, for instance, the right of a baseball player to have a say in the terms on which he's traded to another club and, never forget, it was the Supreme Court which, by saying that President Nixon had to turn over to a House committee tapes of conversations which were highly incriminating, it was the Supreme Court which forced the president to go. In all its 191 years, there have been 101 judges known informally for the longest time as 'the Brethren'. Well, now they have a sister.

President Reagan said during his campaigning last year that when a vacancy came open on the court, he would appoint a woman if he could find one thoroughly qualified but then presidential candidates make even wilder promises than that. When, in July of this year, he actually fulfilled it, the country was shocked and delighted. The lady is Sandra Day O'Connor, 51, wife of a lawyer, mother of three sons, a Westerner of Westerners, born in a hospital in El Paso, Texas, because the 260-acre ranch which her parents worked and lived on, on the New Mexico/Arizona border, had no medical facilities within 150 miles.

Mrs O'Connor's grandfather went West as a pioneer just a hundred years ago to start the ranch and, as a ten-year-old girl she read an encyclopedia indoors and drove a truck and a tractor outdoors. She was bright enough and ambitious enough after high school to do what her father had hoped and failed to do, when his father died, which was to go to California to Stanford University. She whipped through her undergraduate courses in two years instead of the usual four and finished her law studies in another three, joined the Stanford University Law Review, met her husband, a year behind her in law school, and then went out to get a job with a law firm in either Los Angeles or San Francisco.

This was less than 30 years ago but the law firms, good and indifferent, blinked at her as if she wanted to become a professional footballer. They'd never had a woman lawyer in their firms and they didn't intend to start. One firm in Los Angeles, however, agreed to hire her as a legal secretary. She worked her way up to be a deputy county attorney, then she lived for three years in Germany as a lawyer for the army's quartermaster corps. Tnwety-four years ago, she and her husband settled in Phoenix, Arizona.

She tried running her own law firm and handled every petty crime you can think of but then took five years out to raise her family. After that, the way was onward and upward. Assistant to the Attorney General of Arizona, elected as a Republican to the state Senate, became the first woman to lead the party there.

When she tired of politics, she went back to the law, became a trial judge and, eventually, a judge on the Arizona court of appeals, from which office President Reagan snatched her for glory.

All presidential appointments, nominations to the Cabinet, to ambassadorships, to the Supreme Court among others, have to be approved by the Senate and the testing day is always the day that the candidate appears before the appropriate committee; in this case, of course, the Senate judiciary committee. When she appeared a couple of weeks ago, she was as unlike a blue-stocking law student as you could imagine. Pretty, trim, what we old English used to call 'smart', she introduced her husband and three sons, in their twenties, made an opening statement which made all the right sounds about the family as the rock on which the country was built.

The 18 members of the committee were beginning to fawn on her, except two who represented, in a polite form, the warriors who had mobilised around the country in opposition to her. These opponents came from the variously named factions of the far right, especially the Right to Life advocates and the moral majority. Most of these and collateral groups were outraged at the president's choice. Why?

Well, because they'd riffled through the 200-odd pieces of legislation she'd voted on in the Arizona state legislature and they had found, if not high crimes and misdemeanours, at least votes, opinions, deeply obnoxious to them. She'd been an early supporter of ERA, the proposed amendment to the Constitution which would specify equal rights for women. Worse, she had, on the record, voted to approve abortion under certain circumstances, notably when the mother's life might be endangered.

Now, both these stands are anathema to the anti-ERA people and the Right to Lifers. They announced in speeches and television plugs and placards in their native haunts that Judge O'Connor's nomination was a betrayal of conservatism and of President Reagan's campaign. If her potential opponents on the Senate committee had really wanted to embarrass and discredit her, they could not have gone about it in a worse way. Instead of prodding her on her judicial philosophy, they kept bringing up the specific issue of abortion. She was well able to handle this, as every other issue, by saying quietly, patiently, sometimes wryly, that it was the Congress's function to make the laws and it was the court's function to see if they met the prescriptions of the Constitution.

She hit the bull's eye by saying in one breath that to her personally abortion was repugnant, but in the next breath saying she couldn't possibly say how she would vote when a particular issue concerning abortion or anything else came up. She went on almost kindly instructing these senators in the sharp distinction necessary between a personal prejudice and the obligation of a judge to meet a particular case and exercise judicial restraint. By the time she was through, even her glowering opponents were charmed.

They should not be fooled. It's astonishing how even veteran senators forget that justices of the Supreme Court, once on the bench, are there for life. They're not running for anything, they cannot be removed except for high crimes and whatever political position they seemed to favour before getting on the bench, they can now afford the luxury of becoming themselves.

Even recent history is battered with examples of presidents who picked what they hoped would become a ventriloquist's doll but the doll turned into a person who could, at last, afford, without fear or favour, to judge according to what he believed were his own, strong, principles.

We shall see!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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