OPINION: Sandra O’Connor was a remarkable Supreme Court Justice
Jim Jones
Sandra Day O’Connor, who died on Dec. 1, was an accomplished jurist who demonstrated that women lawyers and judges are every bit as good as men. Although there were very few job openings for women when she graduated with honors from Stanford Law School in 1952, her remarkable example has brought about a dramatic change in the legal profession. Women have not been handed equality in the legal workplace, they have earned it. I won’t say they have achieved full equality, but there has been tremendous progress over the years. O’Connor helped to forge the way.
I had the privilege of observing Justice O’Connor in action on three occasions in the 1980s and came away mightily impressed. The first instance was in 1983, when the Supreme Court finally heard argument in a case filed in 1975 by former Idaho Attorney General Wayne Kidwell against Oregon and Washington. Kidwell rightly claimed the downstream states were endangering salmon and steelhead runs by overfishing. In 1980, the Court sent the case to trial, which resulted in a decision against Idaho. As Idaho’s AG at the 1983 hearing, I argued that enough fish should be allowed to return to Idaho to perpetuate the runs and provide Idahoans with an allocated share.
It was clear during the hearing that Justice O’Connor understood the need to protect and perpetuate the runs for the benefit of everyone. A number of her male colleagues could not seem to grasp that basic concept. When the decision came out, O’Connor wrote an outstanding opinion favoring Idaho. Unfortunately, it was a dissent that only two other Justices agreed with. It was not a total loss because the majority ruled that states which share a natural resource must “take reasonable steps to conserve and even to augment” the resource for the benefit of all. However, the majority refused to implement a conservation and allocation formula because the runs in the five-year period selected by the trial judge were so depressed that a formula would be pointless. In other words, there were not enough fish to mess with during those five years, so why bother?
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