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Justice Scalia described his jurisprudence as "The Rule of Law as the Law of Rules."
Justice O'Connor, a pragmatist, saw the work of the law as making law work.
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Nothing like a good old "totality of the circumstances" test to ensure full employment for the lawyers!
And perhaps the full corpus of her work should be titled "the totality of the balancing tests."
Good but not quite right. Justice O'Connor, a political hack, made it up as she went along.
But there is a different defense of O'Connor's approach. Scalia's rules are fundamentally a jurisprudence of mistrust. In theory, a vague standard is preferable and can be determinate, if it is being administered by a faithful judiciary, applying the law to facts. Scalia wants hard and fast rules, because he doesn't trust the lower courts to be faithful agents. O'Connor's judicial minimalism, by contrast, trusts the lower courts to apply her decisions faithfully. This is a more Hayekian bottom up approach to reaching optimal decisions, because it can take advantage of the greater information possessed by lower courts hearing a wide range of cases, some of which the USSC did not anticipate.
TODAY, that is.
Rules are a means, not an end. That's what I meant. Do you disagree?
Do you mean we Americans, we human beings, we constitutional attorneys, we moonbats?
Who be the we?
Sandra Day O'Connor: Knuckleball Pitcher of the Supreme Court.
There's still time.