Sandra Day O’Connor may have retired from the U.S. Supreme Court, but she has not given up judging.
Jess Bravin of The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday on O’Connor’s role as a substitute justice at the federal appellate court level, the sort of court Sonia Sotomayor, the newest Supreme Court justice, just left.
O’Connor says one reason she puts on the robes again is that she has to.
Retired justices receive their Supreme Court salaries, but to remain eligible for pay raises they must accept some federal circuit court assignments.
Sandra Day O’Connor
Though no one would really do this for a pay raise, as salary increases for federal judges, or even cost-of-living adjustments, have been few and far between recently.
But O’Connor, 79, adds that she enjoys the work.
“It’s nice to keep your hand in a bit,” she says.
O’Connor, who retired on Jan. 31, 2006, stepped down from active duty on the Supreme Court in part to spend more time with her husband, John O’Connor, who has Alzheimer’s Disease.
She continues to have an office in the Supreme Court building and can have one law clerk.
In filling in at the appellate court level, she has followed in the footsteps of other retired justices, including Byron R. White and Thurgood Marshall.
The Supreme Court retirees sit on three-judge panels, taking the place of a vacationing justice or filling a spot created by a vacancy on the court.
For the most part, the work is not as exalted or as intellectually demanding as that of the Supreme Court.
“Some of the cases are more interesting than others,” O’Connor tactfully told Bravin in an edited transcript of his interview with her.
This was probably clear to O’Connor soon after she took on these temporary assignments.
A New York Times account of her October 2006 stint as a visiting judge on the federal appeals court in Manhattan reported that O’Connor and two other justices heard five relatively routine cases, including a landlord-tenant dispute.
“For the last three cases, Justice O’Connor was rubbing her brow under her cloud of white hair,” the newspaper reported. “When a cell phone rang, she seemed to almost welcome the breach of decorum.”
By Bravin’s count, during her visits to the appellate courts, O’Connor has now “heard nearly 80 cases and written more than a dozen opinions.”
At times, she has found herself bound by a Supreme Court decision that she didn’t agree with when it was made.
In June, she was overruled by the other two judges on a panel for the first time.
She has also learned that the pace is much quicker at the appellate level than it is on the Supreme Court.
“They don’t waste any time,” O’Connor said.
In a sense, though, O’Connor is returning to her judicial roots, as she was a superior court judge in Arizona and a member of that state’s court of appeals before her appointment to the Supreme Court in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan.
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