Which Justice Called Sandra Day O’Connor the “Worst Thing to Happen to the Federal Bench”?
Supreme Court justices rarely say anything negative about each other in public. According to an Arizona lawmaker, one unnamed justice’s trip to NYU some 15 years ago went differently.
Late last month, Arizona lawmakers considered a piece of legislation that would typically put even the most ardent floor proceedings enthusiast to sleep: House Joint Resolution 2002, which would direct the Arizona Historical Advisory Commission to oversee the construction of a statue honoring the late Sandra Day O’Connor, who served as the Arizona Senate’s first woman majority leader—and, later, as the U.S. Supreme Court’s first woman justice.
“Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was a quintessential westerner and Arizonan with a longstanding reputation for intelligence, fairness, compromise and bringing people together,” it reads. “Her legacy has been a source of inspiration to Arizonans and Americans.”
A practical challenge for a proposal like this one, however, is that for many Republican politicians, the mere prospect of honoring O’Connor—a lifelong Republican who had the temerity to sometimes come down to the left of Antonin Scalia on the ideological spectrum—is now tantamount to heresy.
“Sandra Day O’Connor was a member of this legislature, and by all accounts a pretty good one. And then she became a U.S. Supreme Court justice,” said Rep. Alexander Kolodin, who cited “affirmative action and the prolonging of Roe’s terribly unconstitutional precedent” as among the more tragic results of O’Connor’s 25-year tenure. Kolodin, a lawyer who was recently sanctioned by the state bar for his role in Donald Trump’s post-election “Kraken” litigation, concluded as follows: “We cannot allow the distinguished members of this body to have to suffer walking by such an undistinguished jurist when they enter here in the morning.”
Set aside, for a moment, the fact that the statue would have gone to the U.S. Capitol in Washington D.C., thus sparing Kolodin from having to gaze upon it during his daily commute. Among Arizona Republicans, a moderate conservative justice who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan is, in 2024, officially Too Woke to merit posthumous recognition.
Less theatrical but just as dubious was Rep. Neal Carter, also a Republican, who explained his objections to the proposal by relating a story from his time in law school—a “pretty good,” “top-five” law school, he said—some 15 years earlier.
“We had a number of Supreme Court justices who came to speak to us—over the term that I was there, no less than three…different then-sitting Supreme Court justices. And I used to go and hear them,” Carter recalled. “I remember one of them, that I will not name—a then-sitting Supreme Court justice—who declared that Sandra Day O’Connor was the ‘worst thing that happened to the federal bench,’ end-quote.”
“A direct quote,” Carter said a second time. Kolodin, seated behind him, pounded the desk when Carter delivered the punchline.
I do not particularly care about statues, much less statues of a person who is largely responsible for the phrase “President George W. Bush.” That said, anytime an elected official publicly asserts that an anonymous Supreme Court justice was once contemptuous enough of an erstwhile colleague’s legacy to insult her in front of a group of law students, I am going to try and find out if the story is at all real—and, if so, which justice (allegedly) said it.
When I first saw Carter’s quote, I was, let’s say, skeptical. Among Supreme Court justices, who are quick to assure the public that they function as one big happyjurisprudential family despite their disagreements, proclaiming a colleague to be the “worst thing to happen to the federal bench” is the equivalent of a profanity-laced tirade that culminates in physical violence. This is no less true about retired justices; if word were to get out today that, say, Clarence Thomas had taken to calling Anthony Kennedy, who stepped down in 2018, a “pompous dunce with no redeeming qualities,” I promise it would generate a fresh round of headlines bemoaning the Court’s descent into undignified chaos.
Carter, whose priorities in office include fighting “disastrous leftist social policies,” is one of two representatives for House District 8, a suburban district near Phoenix. He was appointed in 2021 by the Pinal County Board of Supervisors to replace an incumbent who died in office, and he won reelection to a full term in 2022. Carter graduated from UCLA in 2006, and from NYU School of Law—a perennial top-five law school—in January 2010. This means he was on campus for a three-and-a-half-year period beginning in the fall of 2006, about a year after O’Connor retired and Justice Samuel Alito took her place.
With this approximate timeline in mind, I called Carter last week to ask for comment for this story. He was glad to elaborate—up to a point.
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