The XX Factor: What women really think.

O'Connor Is Much Among Us

Another thought: If O'Connor's pragmatic, this-case-only approach to judging is particularly female, then maybe that helps explain why male commentators tended to excoriate her for it. I don't think this explains all the frustration with her jurisprudence—as you say, Dahlia, she drove you (and me and plenty of other women) crazy sometimes, too. But it did feel to me that she elicited a sort of scorn from some male academics that seemed awfully pointed in a world in which politesse is usually de rigeur. (Must be that cafe au lait I just drank.)

On a grumpier note: I don't miss O'Connor because I keep encountering her in recent books about the court. In Jan Crawford Greenberg's book, O'Connor is there to tell us that she stepped down when she did because Justice Rehnquist asked her to—an account that hardly squares with her record of forthright independence, and which Rehnquist can never confirm or deny. And then in Jeffrey Toobin's book, O'Connor is full of regrets and distress about the bad end she thinks President Bush ended up coming to. Maybe I should find this refreshing, but it mostly strikes me as depressing—far too little, too late from one of the justices who gave us Bush v. Gore.