O'Connor's Path Led to Center of the Court (WashintonPost.com) By Fred Barbash
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 1, 2005; 12:45 PM

In interviews, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor routinely dismissed the notion that she was a crucial "swing vote," the justice who could sway the nation's highest court one way or the other. Every vote on the court is equal, she would say, no one counting more than any other.

She could afford to scoff. But the litigants and their lawyers could not.

In fact, they crafted their arguments carefully with her in mind, scouring all her writings to make sure they addressed any specific concerns she might have, believing that if they won her, they were considerably more likely to win the case.

It wasn't because she was intrinsically more important than the others. Rather, as she once said, she was "open to persuasion" while some others were not.

Sandra Day O'Connor's influence on the nation's highest court was so great that some academics had come to call it not the "Rehnquist Court," after the Chief Justice, but the "O'Connor Court."

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