The New Year Quote by Sandra Day O'Connor

O'Connor is quietly trying to rewire the public's default setting: stop treating the courthouse like a customer-service counter. Coming from a Supreme Court justice, the line lands with a paradoxical authority. She is defending the legitimacy of courts by arguing for their strategic scarcity. The intent isn't to diminish law; it's to preserve it for the moments when law is the only language left.

The subtext is institutional triage. Courts are slow, expensive, adversarial machines designed to produce binding outcomes, not emotional closure. When every conflict is translated into a lawsuit, the system becomes a blunt instrument: winners and losers, scorched relationships, clogged dockets. O'Connor's phrasing - "begins" versus "end" - casts litigation as a last-resort punctuation mark, not the plot. It's also a subtle rebuke to the American reflex for rights-talk, where personal grievance quickly escalates into a claim of entitlement and a demand for judgment.

Context matters: O'Connor spent decades watching an expanding litigation culture collide with limited judicial capacity. The late 20th century brought rising caseloads, class actions, and a more visible "sue first" ethos, while courts increasingly pushed arbitration, mediation, and settlement conferences. Her quote tracks that movement, but with a civic argument underneath: alternative dispute resolution isn't just efficiency theater. It's a bet that people can negotiate, repair, and compromise without outsourcing every moral disagreement to a robed referee.

There's a faint warning, too. If courts become the starting line for ordinary disputes, they stop being the final guardian for extraordinary ones.