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originated in Arizona mining country, and he was leading an expedition to the sites where the dispute arose. By chance Justice O’Connor was in Phoenix, where she maintained a home. When she heard that one of her pals, an Arizona State Supreme Court justice, was going on the trip, she decided to go, too. As the vans rumbled across the high desert en route to lunch at a local ranch, they came to a gully that was running with floodwater too deep to cross. They were marooned for several hours. The situation worsened rapidly when Justice O’Connor revealed that she had to pee. As the organizers sat looking stunned and helpless, the justice clambered out of the van.
    â€œDon’t worry about me,” she told the assembled barristers. “I’ll just find a mesquite bush to go behind.” Seeing their reaction, she added, “I grew up on a ranch!” And so she did. “I’ll never forget it,” said the archivist, “a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States dropping trou behind a mesquite tree.”
    When Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993, someone sent her a fax relating that one of her old law school classmates told a meeting of his Rotary Club that the guys in her law school class used to call her by the nickname “Bitch.” “Better bitch,” Ginsburg responded, looking back on her journey from the derisive Harvard Law School scene to the highest court in the land, “than mouse.”

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Country Girl, City Kid
    GROWING UP ON A RANCH
    Sandra’s father, Harry Day, wanted to go to college. He thought he’d go to Stanford after serving in World War I. But just as he set out for college, his father, H. C. Day, died, leaving his parched and dusty family ranch in southeast Arizona in terrible financial straits. Harry had to leave California to see if he could rescue the cattle-raising operation. He never got to go to college. It was one of the regrets of his life.
    But he was lucky in love. In 1927, on a cattle-buying trip to El Paso, he met Ada Mae Wilkey, from an El Paso ranching family, whom he had once known as a girl. Ada Mae, a college grad married briefly and abruptly divorced in the 1920s, had a checkered past. Still, her family didn’t want her marrying Harry Day and living on that primitive ranch with no power and no water. So the couple eloped.
    Ada Mae was a trouper. She planted a garden around the little adobe house in the dry landscape. She played the piano and cooked huge meals, for the help or for parties. Biographer Joan Biskupic describes Sandra’s parents as presenting a decidedly mixed message, the father “a Gary Cooper individualist” can-do type, the mother a stockinged woman in a frock in the ’30s dust bowl, always “a lady.”
    When, in 1930, Ada Mae was ready to give birth to the baby girl who would become Justice O’Connor, she went to El Paso, where there were modern health services. After a time, Harry Day came to visit his firstborn, Sandra.
    DA, as she calls him, is the unrivaled star of O’Connor’schildhood memoir Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest. The justice’s brother, Alan Day, who wrote the book with her, vividly recalls his oldest sibling as the favorite. His father “was on his best behavior when she was around, because Sandra would bring up stimulating subjects that he would want to talk about. And they would mentally head down the path together.” (There was also a sister, Ann, eight years younger than Sandra.) Harry Day was a vociferous conservative of the pure free-market variety. Self-reliance and individual responsibility were his touchstones. When Sandra was six, her parents sent her away to El Paso to live with her grandmother during the school year and go to proper schools. She found her grandmother totally annoying: “My grandmother was a nonstop talker. If her eyes were open, her lips were moving. It created