PROVO — Irony ruled the moment Sandra Day O'Connor was asked to consider becoming the first female jurist of the U.S. Supreme Court.
One of her supporters was then-U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, a partner at a law firm that offered O'Connor her first job after law school — as a legal secretary.
When Smith called about the high court post, O'Connor recalls with a grin, "It must be a secretarial position, is it not?"
O'Connor, whose court candidacy came a year after Ronald Reagan pledged during the 1980 election to nominate a female justice, spoke Thursday at Brigham Young University.
The iconoclastic O'Connor enraptured the crowd with her views on the current state of the court, a dedication to protecting liberties provided by the Bill of Rights and her struggle to smash gender barriers in the legal profession.
"It was important to be the first (female justice) — I just didn't want to be the last," she said, eliciting laughter.
O'Connor learned how to work hard while toiling alongside ranch dudes at her family's Lazy-B cattle ranch in Arizona.
"Verbal skills were less important than a knowledge of how things worked," she said. "Personal qualities of honesty, dependability, competence and humor were valued most."
O'Connor wanted to study economics at Stanford University, hoping to apply business savvy at the ranch.
But the lure of law school — the chance to argue for rights given to citizens by the country's guiding documents — was too much to resist. At the time, few women applied.
"I didn't have a clue of what a tort was when I went to law school," she admitted.
After graduation, O'Connor, who met her husband, John, at Stanford's law school, was faced with the realities of the 1950s job market: Private firms didn't hire women.
She turned to the government, where women lawyers were more welcome, and was hired as a deputy county attorney.
After returning from a three-year stint in Germany, where her husband served as part of the armed forces, O'Connor struggled again to find a job with a law firm.
Undaunted, she started her own with an old friend.
"We just took whatever came in the door," she said.
In time, O'Connor became an assistant state attorney general in Arizona. And when a state senator resigned for a federal appointment, O'Connor was named to the seat, won re-election and became the majority leader — the first woman to gain the position in a U.S. state legislature. O'Connor, mother of three boys, then ran for a judgeship on a county superior court, and a year later was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals.
The next case on her life's docket: the Supreme Court.
Her nomination didn't come without controversy, however. Conservatives clucked about her pro-choice voting record, and liberal groups fretted about her Reagan-influenced politics.
After 21 years, she's shed an image as a staunch conservative and emerged as the court's swing-vote centrist. It's been said that however O'Connor goes, so goes the court.
"My current view of the court is that it is like a firefighter," said O'Connor. "It's a reactionary institution, putting out blazes here and there and making sure we don't burn the house down." The balancing act of the court, she said, is to make sure the rights of the minority aren't trampled by the majority, even though majority rule is inherent in a democracy.
As a result, the court, which is insulated politically because members aren't elected, is often thrust into controversy.
Without the court's authority to interpret the law, she said, Congress could easily usurp the rights of those not in power.
And because of the court's power, "it is possible for a single citizen to win victory in the Supreme Court that neither Congress nor the president can take away," she said.
E-MAIL: jeffh@desnews.com