More on O'Connor

I linked, last week, to an outstanding post from Beldar about Sandra Day O'Connor and her legislative background and outlook. Betsy Newmark has linked this morning to a Krauthammer piece in the Washington Post, covering some of the same territory.

This is O'Connorism in its purest essence. She had not so much a judicial philosophy as a social philosophy. Unlike a principled conservative such as Antonin Scalia, or a principled liberal such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, O'Connor had no stable ideas about constitutional interpretation. Her idea of jurisprudence was to decide whether legislation produced social "systems" that either worked or did not.
...
The problem with ad hoc pragmatism, however, is that it turns the Supreme Court not only into a super-legislature but also into a continuously sitting one. Does anyone have any idea exactly how many reindeer are required to make a town's Christmas creche display constitutionally kosher? Or exactly how much weight you are allowed to give racial preference in hiring? The only way to know is to sue and go back once again to the Supreme Court. "The joke," writes professor Mark Tushnet in his book on the Rehnquist court, "was that people could save a lot of time and effort in making laws and filing lawsuits if only O'Connor would answer her phone and let them know what she thought beforehand."

Good stuff from Krauthammer, as always.