Why lawyers may not miss Sandra Day O'Connor

Here's a beautiful paragraph summarizing precisely why I, who spends my life reviewing case law, will be delighted to see O'Connor leave the bench:

O’Connor has often been praised for her “nuance.” For conservative legal scholars, this is a synonym for “mishmash.” O’Connor has a deep sense of justice and fairness, and a profound desire to produce what she views as the “right” result in any particular case. But this motivation, however admirable, is better suited to an arbitrator than a Supreme Court justice. O’Connor’s impulses produced jurisprudence that is inconsistent, complicated, completely fact-dependent, and nearly impossible to follow. As a result, a case may be decided by the Supreme Court, but thousands of similar lower court cases must still be litigated, simply because their facts differed oh-so-slightly.