Sandra Day O'Connor: An Exclusive Interview

Steve Scher
09/15/2009 at 9:00 a.m.

She graduated third in her class at Stanford Law School, but no firm would hire a female attorney in 1952. Almost 30 years later, she became the first woman on the Supreme Court. Former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor joins us for an exclusive interview on her days on the High Court and the appointment of Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Then, do you thrill to see the variety of moths that bang up against your porch light at night? Do you make up names for each new creature you see? Carol Kaesuk Yoon is devoted to the dying art and science of taxonomy, the practice of scientific classification. If we don't take part in naming the living things around us, Yoon says, we lose part of our humanity and we may become oblivious to the extinctions and invasions around us.

Related Event

Carol Kaesuk Yoon speaks tonight downstairs at Town Hall at 7:30 p.m., 1119 Eighth Avenue in Seattle. Tickets are $5 at www.brownpapertickets.com.

Guest(s)

Former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor served as the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1981 to 2006. She earned both her bachelor and law degrees from Stanford University and graduated third in her law school class. She voted on many groundbreaking cases on affirmative action, abortion, equal protection, and the 2000 presidential recount, among others.

Carol Kaesuk Yoon writes about biology for The New York Times. She is the author of "Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science." She studied biology at Yale and Cornell, where she earned a PhD researching the evolution and genetics of fruit fly mating songs.