news-record.com

Sandra Day O'Connor was a key member of the U.S. Supreme Court for 25 years, but the job might have kept her bottled up for too long.

Since her retirement in 2006, she's become a passionate advocate for three important causes: improving the judiciary, teaching civics in school, and encouraging young lawyers to go into public service.

Students at Elon University School of Law heard it all Monday. O'Connor, who turns 80 on March 26, answered questions about her own remarkable career but made sure she delivered her favorite messages.

They were worth hearing far beyond the downtown Greensboro law school, which she helped dedicate at its 2006 opening.

O'Connor faulted North Carolina for still choosing judges by election.

"I'm sorry to say -- very sorry to say -- that's not a good way to go," she scolded.

"I know you have some public funding of elections, and it's nonpartisan, but that doesn't do enough," she said. "I hope that someday you'll think about something else in North Carolina."

That would be a system of merit selection and appointment, possibly with periodic retention elections for sitting judges. As a leader in the Arizona legislature in 1974, she launched a successful effort to switch from election to selection.

"Our judges improved markedly with the appointive system," she said.

O'Connor has made that argument to other states, and she ought to return to pitch it to North Carolina legislative leaders. The biggest problem with judicial elections here, as elsewhere, is that few voters know enough about the courts or candidates to make reasoned, informed decisions. Elections leave to chance decisions that are too important to get wrong.

But O'Connor is taking another approach to that problem, too. She's chairwoman of a national effort to boost civics education in middle schools. North Carolina students could use more of those lessons before they grow up to be as ill-equipped for responsible citizenship as many adults.

Lawyers have an important role to play in improving society, O'Connor said, encouraging students to consider careers in public service. She was an assistant county attorney, assistant attorney general and legislator before rising to the bench in Arizona and then on the national level.

Elon law students have heard all that before: Leadership and service are among the founding principles of their school.

Maybe it means more coming from someone as accomplished and respected as Sandra Day O'Connor, who loved the law so much that she took her first job without pay and balanced the demands of a wife and mother with a successful professional life.

Now, after her career, she still loves the law enough to work for better courts, better civics education and better lawyers. Maybe she can be as influential in this role as she was on the court.