Justice O’Connor set the tone in her chambers by hiring a large number of female clerks, setting herself apart from the other justices.
And while she was demanding — accepting no excuses for mistakes, a lesson she drew from growing up on a ranch in the West — she also took an interest in her clerks and their personal lives.
“She would give them career advice, she would give them jobs,” said the historian Evan Thomas, who interviewed 94 former O’Connor clerks for his biography of the justice, “First.”“She told them to get out and get exercise, always take care of your family, give good dinner parties, never be too busy to take care of people,” he said.
“You had to have a life.”For the women who clerked under Justice O’Connor, there was a keen awareness of both the barriers she had broken and her desire to be viewed outside of that history.
Some recounted her wish to have her headstone reflect only that she had been a good judge, her relief when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg became a second woman to sit on the court and her insistence that her gender did not shape her decisions.
Persons:
O’Connor, ”, Evan Thomas, “, Justice O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Cristina Rodríguez
Organizations:
Yale Law School
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