By Stephanie Vaccaro, Staff Writer
When sixth grader Charlie Doran of Princeton went to visit his grandparents two summers ago in Chatauqua, N.Y., he had no idea the friend he’d be making was the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
”Well, I met Justice O’Connor two years ago,” said Charlie. “I was in a deli market at my grandparents’ summer home in Chatauqua. We walked in and we were just getting some stuff. My grandparents had told me than an ex-Supreme Court justice had been staying in the house next to us. They mentioned that at the time we went to the deli market and she was in there, and my grandfather introduced me to her.”
”I believe it was the next day I went to her house and she told me about this really cool website she had, and I tried it,” he said.
The website was the earlier version of what has now become www.icivics.org.
”It’s a website for kids,” said Charlie. “It’s just about the three branches of government, and there are many games. So that’s how our relationship started.”
Because of his friendship with Justice O’Connor, he was the first kid to test the new website our after the relaunch.
”After that, I pretty much saw her every day,” he said.
He would tell her how well he had done playing certain games. When he told Justice O’Connor he had earned 2,000 points for a particular game, she said, “Wow, that’s really awesome.”
She had gone golfing with his grandparents, and Charlie had gone along, sitting in the golf cart recording scores with his grandmother. Justice O’Connor was a pretty good golfer, said Charlie. But one day, she hit a shot that kept rolling on the green and shouted, “stop, murderers stop,” something Charlie found to be quite funny given her profession.
She offered to take Charlie to the movies, to which his grandparents said, oh, you don’t have to do that.
”Being her feisty self, she said ‘we’re so going to do that,’” he said. Finding no interesting movies, so instead she took him mini-golfing. Justice O’Connor won. “She actually had three holes-in-one, if I remember correctly,” he said. “Then we went out and got ice cream after that.”
”Over the winter, spring and fall of those years, we’ve been writing back and forth,” he said.
This past summer, while visiting with Justice O’Connor, Charlie got to meet Justice Anthony Kennedy as well.
”She still has a chamber office in Washington, D.C., in the Supreme Court,” he said. And last summer she extended an invitation for Charlie to visit with his family, some friends and one of his teachers.
”I never really thought that that was going to happen, I just thought it was cool to think about that,” he said. “Then I got a letter from her saying a time that would be good was the end of March, so we went and had a really great time.”
Justice O’Connor’s assistant gave them a tour of the court, and then they met with her in her chamber for about an hour.
Her office gives you the sense of her home state Arizona, he said. “There are pictures of Arizona everywhere, pictures of her family in the desert and on the beach.”
”We just sat there for 45 minutes and asked her a lot of questions, and then at the end she gave us Constitution books and signed them all for all my friends,” he said.
He chose Mary Demarest, his fourth grade teacher, to join them on the trip.
”That was the year of the presidential election, so we had done a unit on the election that year, and I had learned all of my knowledge of the Congress and Senate from her,” he said. “She is one of my favorite teachers.”
They asked Justice O’Connor what were her most difficult cases.
”Her response to that was, ‘I don’t know, they’re all obviously, if they got there they had to be hard,’” he said. “She had told me a few summers back that one of her most difficult cases was Al Gore/George Bush and deciding upon that. She felt like she had some regrets of the situation, now knowing more of what happened now.”
On her first day of being on the Supreme Court, she was a junior justice, she voted last. On her first case the vote was four all, leaving hers to be the deciding vote, he said.
”She said that was a little nerve-wracking,” he said.
”I’ve learned everything I know about the Supreme Court, how many judges are on it, how they make some of their decisions,” said Charlie, who is now studying the Constitution. “The timeframes of when they take cases, oral arguments, everything I’ve learned from her and from the trip.”
”She thinks this website is very important for middle-schoolers to know,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s a little more important than taking math because this is real life situations. If you get a parking ticket, you have to go court. You get into a car accident, you have to go to court, so you need to know this stuff.”
”She has really inspired me to become a lawyer,” he said. “I think the law is really important for our lives. It’s so important to make sure it’s followed.”
Charlie hopes to see her again this summer.
”She’s not only a great role model for me and a Supreme Court justice, but she’s a really great friend,” he said.

