Justice Sandra Day O'Connor may have served a crucial centrist role on the Supreme Court for her 24 terms, but the jury will apparently be out for a while when it comes to defining her legacy there.

When O'Connor, 75, announced July 1 that she would step down as soon as her replacement has been confirmed, commentators began evaluating her judicial career. Many were complimentary about her pioneering role as the first woman on the court and her knack for carving out a narrow consensus amid the dramatically different views of her fellow justices.

Over the last 10 years, O'Connor has voted in the majority on 5-4 decisions 77 percent of the time, more than any other justice, according to data compiled by Georgetown University Law Center's Supreme Court Institute.

Depending upon who replaces O'Connor on the court, some of those narrow rulings may be ripe for reversal, according to a panel of Georgetown law professors at a July 7 program at the Law Center on her legacy.

Visiting professor Martin Lederman thinks narrow majority rulings in cases involving the First Amendment's Establishment Clause could be the first to go. Those have included decisions permitting voucher programs to include religious schools and those allowing state-funded student assistance programs to operate at religious schools.

He said O'Connor's way of weighing the constitutionality of government funding for things that touch on religion will not hold up in a differently constituted Supreme Court. Her standard asked whether a "reasonable observer" would think the action amounts to government endorsement of religion.

O'Connor-led majorities in cases including Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which permitted Pennsylvania to impose some restrictions on access to abortion, "won't hold without her mediating authority," Lederman said. Which direction the shift will go will depends upon the makeup of the court once she's gone, he added, but "the center will not hold."

Professor Nina Pillard, a former deputy assistant attorney general, said one oft-cited criticism of O'Connor is that she did not go far enough to solidify the type of values people expected from someone who held office as a Republican and was appointed by President Ronald Reagan. Abortion opponents complain that she could have cast the deciding vote in Casey to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion.

But Pillard said that although "the right is demonizing" her and "the left is lionizing" her "O'Connor did an enormous amount to legitimize conservative values" in the courts and in the country.

Her practice of applying laws to the specifics of just the case at hand "slowed the pace of constitutional change," Pillard said, and ultimately accomplished more to change the country's attitudes about restricting abortion, for instance, than would have occurred if the court had reversed Roe in one fell swoop years ago.

"Her refusal to drop a guillotine and change course did more for acceptance of conservative values than would a one-time extreme change," she said. "It was a more moderate and less arrogant approach than other justices would impose."

Others on the panel were much more harsh in their views about O'Connor.

Professor Louis Michael Seidman said he considers O'Connor "far from the worst justice in court history, or even among the current members of the court."

"But her current canonization is hard to take," he said, even in light of the tradition of being generous when a prominent person retires or dies, because he considers her "a person of very limited abilities and very limited vision, with no discernable legal theory."

Seidman, who served as a clerk to the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, said O'Connor's tremendous power on the court was "partly happenstance," and that her decisions in criminal cases, especially, suffered from her "white, upper middle-class suburbia values."

He cited O'Connor's role in two recent cases involving traffic stops as an illustration. In one, she found that a suburban woman was unjustly treated by police enforcing a law on seat-belt use when she was arrested in front of her young children and held for an hour. In the other, she upheld the arrest and conviction of someone who had been a passenger in a car in which illegal drugs were found when police searched the vehicle without a warrant after seeing a bundle of cash as the driver pulled out his registration form.

"The difference between the cases where she does and doesn't (base her decision on individual circumstances) says a lot," Seidman said.

Georgetown law professor Jane Stromseth said when she clerked for O'Connor "above all we saw her fair-mindedness."

Stromseth said that as a one-time Arizona legislator --- O'Connor was the first woman to be elected majority leader of a state Senate --- she "was guided by a commitment to and a deep understanding of the role of state governments. She believed the solutions to problems were best designed by those closest to them."

And while O'Connor is famous for pooh-poohing the idea that being a woman led her to rule as a judge differently than a man would, Stromseth said she clearly brought a woman's touch to the way the court operates.

For instance, while O'Connor expected her clerks to work on many weekends, she also would cook lunch for them herself, Stromseth said. "She was very demanding, but also warm and supportive."

"In the end, the wisdom, balance and fairness she brought to the court will be sorely missed," Stromseth said.

---CNS