Justice In The Balance

Surprise Resignation By O'Connor Opens Up Hot Nomination Battle

(CBS/AP)  O'Connor's decision capped a pioneer's career. President Ronald Reagan broke nearly 200 years of tradition in 1981 when he named her — a top-ranked graduate of Stanford law school — as the first woman to wear the robes of a justice.

"As the first woman to be appointed to this court, Sandra Day O'Connor was thrust into the spotlight as no new justice has ever been," Justice Antonin Scalia said in a written statement issued by the court.

Aware by her own account of the historical burden, she evolved into a moderate conservative, but more importantly, the consistent center of a fractured court.

In her first term, she cast the deciding vote and wrote a 5-4 ruling that said a Mississippi all-women college must allow a male student to study nursing.

It was the first of many such cases.

She voted with the majority on three significant 5-4 cases in recent years: the disputed 2000 presidential election that went to Bush, and a ruling last year that said the war on terrorism did not give the government a blank check to hold terror suspects in legal limbo.

Nowhere was her legal thinking more carefully scrutinized than when it came to abortion, an issue that divides the court as it does the country.

O'Connor balked at letting states outlaw most abortions, refusing in 1989 to join four other justices who were ready to reverse the landmark 1973 decision that said women have a constitutional right to abortion.

In 1992, she helped forge a five-justice majority that reaffirmed the core holding of the 1973 ruling. Then, in 2000, she provided the fifth and decisive vote that struck down a Nebraska law that was aimed at banning a procedure critics call "partial-birth abortions."

In her opinion, she wrote that to be constitutional, a ban must include "an exception to preserve the life and health of the mother."

Last week, she sided with a 5-4 majority in a ruling that threw out the sentence of a death row inmate and warned state courts that shoddy legal defense representation wouldn't be tolerated.

In a one-sentence written statement on Friday, O'Connor cited her age and said she "needs to spend time" with her family.

Her official resignation letter was brief.

"It has been a great privilege indeed to have served as a member of the court for 24 terms," the 75-year-old justice wrote to Bush. "I will leave it with enormous respect for the integrity of the court and its role under our constitutional structure."

"For an old ranching girl, you turned out pretty good," Bush told her in a private call not long after receiving her letter, an aide said.

Then, in the Rose Garden outside the Oval Office, he praised her as "a discerning and conscientious judge and a public servant of complete integrity."

Partisans on both sides have been preparing for a vacancy for months. Given her opinions on abortion, O'Connor's decision to step down raised the stakes for partisans on both sides of the issue.

Senate aides of both parties held strategy meetings during the day.

CBS News Legal Analyst Andrew Cohen said O'Connor's departure is "far more significant" than the conservative Rehnquist's would have been.

"She was the pivotal 'swing' vote on many of the most contentious issues of the day, from affirmative action to abortion rights, from campaign-finance reform to federal disability access law, from gay rights to the death penalty," said Cohen.