Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was supposed to be enjoying this Christmas as her first in retirement after an illustrious quarter-century of service on the nation's highest court. But with John G. Roberts Jr. now chief justice, Harriet Miers still White House counsel and Samuel A. Alito Jr. awaiting Senate hearings in January, O'Connor continues to sit on the court, asking her usual precise and well-prepared questions of advocates, writing her usual clear and straightforward opinions and, in short, performing one last coda to one of the most remarkable judicial performances in the history of the Supreme Court.

With celebrations, tributes and toasts to O'Connor on indefinite hold, Joan Biskupic's biography is a most welcome prelude. This highly readable and engaging work is not an authorized biography; O'Connor is among the justices most committed to keeping the court's inner deliberations secret and has opposed the early release of justices' papers to the public. Unable to rely on interviews with the justice herself, Biskupic, a lawyer who covers the Supreme Court for USA Today, has painstakingly researched her subject by interviewing family members and former clerks and mining the personal papers of other justices, notably those of Thurgood Marshall and Harry A. Blackmun.

What emerges is a powerful and persuasive account of O'Connor as the most astute political leader on the court since Justice William J. Brennan, the elfin Irishman from New Jersey who was the intellectual fulcrum of the Warren Court in the 1960s. Brennan famously quipped that the most important skill for any justice on the nine-member court was "counting to five." O'Connor, Biskupic tells us, has been a genius at this kind of math for more than two decades.

The origins of O'Connor's extraordinary tenure are told briskly. The childhood of the only Supreme Court justice ever inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame was spent largely on the Lazy B Ranch in Arizona, a place where women had presumptive equality because there was so much work to do.

O'Connor's big academic break was attending Stanford University, as her father had wished to do. She was a superb student, entering at age 16, finishing a bachelor's degree and a law degree in a mere six years and graduating near the top of the same Stanford Law School class of 1952 as the future Chief Justice Rehnquist. Over cite-checking for the Stanford Law Review, she met and fell in love with her fellow law student John O'Connor, whom she soon married.

While Rehnquist rocketed to a Supreme Court clerkship after Stanford, his future colleague on the court faced blunt sex discrimination at the bar; law firms, O'Connor later recounted, would consider her as a secretary but not a lawyer, with one even asking her if she typed. O'Connor's response was resourcefulness and resilience. She talked her way into a job in a local prosecutor's office. She worked as a government lawyer when her husband was stationed in Germany serving in the Judge Advocate General Corps. She opened a storefront law office in a shopping center when she and her husband settled back in Phoenix. Biskupic repeatedly cites her "no-nonsense, no-pity" mantra: "That's the way it is. ... Deal with it."

But O'Connor was also traditionalist enough - she took five years off to raise her three sons - to impress Republican Party strategists as their kind of "sharp gal." In short, she threaded the needle, outshining male counterparts while remaining within conventional gender expectations. The same stealth brilliance characterized O'Connor's rise to leadership on the court, as Biskupic tells it. O'Connor, together with her close colleague Rehnquist, favored states' rights positions - which reflected their experience of the importance of state government in the West but clashed with the Warren Court's view of the federal government as the chief fountainhead of social and economic policy and the chief guardian of constitutional rights. But O'Connor's instincts on the court, as in the legislature, were centrist, and her chief mentor and friend in the early years was Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Biskupic identifies O'Connor's successful battle with breast cancer in 1988 as a turning point. She endured surgery and chemotherapy without missing a single court sitting. She fended off reporters' prying prurience with an exasperated statement: "I am not sick. I am not bored. I am not resigning." And she started crafting 5-to-4 majorities on issues from abortion to affirmative action to corporate liability to the separation of church and state. "Now she was exercising more than the swing vote," Biskupic writes. "Nearly twenty-five years younger than Brennan and an emboldened survivor of breast cancer, O'Connor had figured out how to line up votes as effectively as Brennan could. ... She had bested the men at their own game."

Biskupic thus convincingly counters accounts describing O'Connor's use of the swing vote on the court as somehow capricious or indecisive - accounts that sometimes smack of sexual stereotyping. Rather, Biskupic portrays O'Connor as socially astute, intellectually muscular and entirely deliberate in leading the court toward centrist positions: on abortion, permit but discourage; on church and state, acknowledge but do not endorse religion; on affirmative action, use race as a factor in admissions but not racial quotas.

Such centrist positions overwhelmingly track public opinion while infuriating the far-right factions who have thought the Supreme Court should be their prize since Reagan won in 1980. Biskupic shows, however, that such positions were not just political compromises but expressions of a kind of constitutional common law. Other conservative justices before O'Connor had also adapted the Constitution's original principles to new circumstances by articulating similar tests.

O'Connor, as Biskupic portrays her, was not just a swing vote operating case by case but the author of constitutional standards that would govern future cases: Abortion regulations may not impose an "undue burden" on women seeking the procedure, religious symbols may not appear to the "reasonable observer" to endorse a faith, the federal government may not "commandeer" state officials and so on.

At the book's close, Biskupic quotes the justice's own characteristically matter-of-fact words: "There's only nine of us, so everyone has a very key vote. It's not a question about gaining power or influence. We try to persuade by the strength of the argument in a particular case." Yet O'Connor's own persuasive power has made her the most influential woman in American history.

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