Justice O’Connor Gets the Gift of Deodorant

Sandra Day O’Connor is getting an ethics award for her commitment to an unpoliticized judiciary

The University of Illinois is giving retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor an award.

O’Connor has been selected as the 2008 recipient of the Paul H. Douglas Ethics in Government Award from the Institute of Government and Public Affairs…

Since her retirement, she has actively spoken out about keeping the judicial branch free from political pressure.

Her activism has, it seems, evolved since before her retirement:

[A]t an election-night party on Nov. 7, surrounded for the most part by friends and familiar acquaintances, [Justice O'Connor] let her guard drop for a moment when she heard the first critical returns shortly before 8 p.m. Sitting in her hostess’s den, staring at a small black-and-white television set, she visibly started when CBS anchor Dan Rather called Florida for Al Gore. "This is terrible," she exclaimed. She explained to another partygoer that Gore’s reported victory in Florida meant that the election was "over," since Gore had already carried two other swing states, Michigan and Illinois.

Moments later, with an air of obvious disgust, she rose to get a plate of food, leaving it to her husband to explain her somewhat uncharacteristic outburst. John O’Connor said his wife was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona, and a Gore win meant they’d have to wait another four years. O’Connor, the former Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate and a 1981 Ronald Reagan appointee, did not want a Democrat to name her successor.

Presumably the award, like Justice O’Connor’s ethics and the decision that is her real legacy, is limited to the present circumstances.

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