O’Connor Still Decides Cases; Issues Range from Pet Wolves to Stolen Wire
Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has left the nation’s highest court, but she’s not exactly retired.
O’Connor has been working as a substitute judge on federal appeals courts and has heard almost 80 cases since stepping down from the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Cases rarely involve the weighty legal issues O’Connor once pondered on the U.S. Supreme Court. Her latest opinion, for example, begins this way: “This is a case about a wolf named Dutchess.” She ruled a couple could not sue an animal control officer for trespass because he entered their property to impound the animal, even though they had licensed the wolf as an Alaskan Malamute.
Other cases before O’Connor have concerned whether the theft of copper tubing in air-conditioning units is covered under an insurance policy, or whether Puerto Rican courts are foreign or domestic.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, O’Connor confessed that most of her caseload is “not particularly demanding, intellectually.”
Yet the work has its pressures, since judges sometimes decide questions right after oral arguments, she told the newspaper. “They don’t waste any time,” she said. “I liked, here at the [Supreme] Court, to take time to reflect on what I heard and check my notes and put together thoughts.”
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “A Cowgirl Rides the Circuits”
