Goodbye -- and good riddance
I see where the legacy media and even some right-leaning bloggers have started with the hosannahs for Justice O'Connor. Whatever her virtues as an individual -- reportedly, she's kind to her clerks, among other things -- Sandra Day O'Connor is a gawd awful justice, rivaling Anthony Kennedy in intellectual vacuity and given not only to confusing her own policy preferences with the commands of the Constitution, but also to confusing the Court with Mt. Olympus.
Matthew Franck is spot on:
Many pixels will be posted on O'Connor and the nomination battle to come. My opening shot is that, whatever else might be said about her character or her significance as the first female justice, O'Connor should be remembered as one of the worst contributors to American jurisprudence in recent history. She was notorious as a "swing vote," equally maddening to Left and Right at various times. But she consistently held one of the most expansionist views of judicial power, committed always to the most capacious version of the Court's authority over American life.
I won't miss her.