Justice & Law Quote by Sandra Day O'Connor

The most arresting move here is the casual self-indictment disguised as nostalgia. O'Connor opens with a wink about the "dark ages", but the joke is doing real work: it frames American legal education's insularity as a habit so old it can be shrugged off as quaint. That softening matters because what follows is not an argument against comparative law so much as a portrait of institutional reflex. "It never would have occurred to me" isn't principle; it's muscle memory.

The repetition of "never" and the plainspoken "We just didn't do it" land like a closed door. There's a cultural confidence embedded in that simplicity: American courts, particularly in O'Connor's formative era, treated law as a self-contained national project. The subtext is less "foreign precedents are irrelevant" than "looking outward would have felt improper, even faintly disloyal". She's describing a professional environment where the boundaries of legitimacy were policed by custom, not by careful reasoning.

Context sharpens the edge. O'Connor served during a period when globalization and human-rights jurisprudence started to seep into legal conversations, and the Supreme Court began to flirt - controversially - with citing foreign and international sources. Her remark reads like a gentle explanation to a changing audience: if earlier courts ignored the world, it wasn't necessarily because they had disproven it; they had barely considered it. The intent is quietly corrective, inviting listeners to see tradition as contingent, not sacred.