O’Connor on the Court

By CHARLES M. BLOW
NYT

This week I was invited to a lunch at which former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the Supreme Court was the speaker. With the rumbling about Justice John Paul Stevens’s impending departure, I just had to go.

O’Connor, 80, was rather feisty and funny and confined her prepared remarks to the deplorable state of civics education in this country and to promoting her new project, ourcourts.org, a Web-based educational site designed to combat the problem. “Only 1 in 7 Americans knows that John Roberts is chief justice of the Supreme Court, but two-thirds can name at least one judge of ‘American Idol,’ ” she said.

But during the question-and-answer portion, she made a strong case for more diversity of experience and gender on the court.

On the issue of the court being completely composed of former federal judges, she said: “In the past, we’ve had a very diverse court, at times, and typically we’ve had people on the court who didn’t serve one day as a judge. Sorry. You know. I’m a judge. I like judges. But we don’t need them all on the court. And we need people of different backgrounds.”

(More here.)