Her majesty.

• Author: Caplan, Lincoln
• Position: Book Review

THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice by Sandra Day O'Connor Random House, $25.95

SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR, THE first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court and a conservative whose independent streak has made her the swing vote, is now 73. She's said to be close to retiring, and The Majesty of the Law could be her valediction. During her 22 years as a justice, O'Connor has achieved a populist-tinged celebrity. As the Westerner who grew up on her family's Lazy B cattle ranch in the Arizona desert and was elected majority leader of the Arizona state senate, she has a self-reliant, democratic aura. As the third-ranked student in her Stanford Law School class whose only job offer when she graduated was to be a secretary, and as the mother who stepped out of the job market to raise her three boys, she has put up with the indignities and carried the responsibilities of upper-class women in her generation.

O'Connor's reflections provide sympathetic and vinegary evidence supporting this view. They come in six parts, ranging from "Life on the Court" through "The Legal Profession and the Courts" to "The Rule of Law in the Twenty-first Century." In a chapter about the the late Thurgood Marshall's personal influence on her during the decade they served together, she wonders how it was possible for this black legal pioneer to confront "the darkest recesses of human nature--bigotry, hatred, and selfishness--and emerge wholly intact." In a chapter that recounts the obstacles to women getting the right to vote and then exercising it, she says that the divergence of men's and women's votes in 1952, the year she came of age politically, gave the lie to the "miserable pre-war stereotype of women following their husbands or fathers, sheep-like, into the polling booth"

But the striking quality of The Majesty of the Law is its remoteness. The plucky Arizonan comes across as a woman who holds herself above the fray. Sometimes, her goal is to explain the big picture, whether about the job of the Supreme Court ("to develop a reasonably uniform and consistent body of federal law") or the one it shares with other government bodies. ("We must never forget, however, that the answers to many of our deepest national dilemmas may lie not in Washington, D.C., but in the American spirit of ingenuity embodied in lawmaking authority closest to the people themselves: our state and local legislatures.")

Often, while offering a correction to what she regards as a...