NEW GIGS

Sandra Day O’Connor’s Day Job

She’s a substitute judge in small appellate courts.

She’s still got it: Her former colleagues may not know it, but Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has been filling in as a substitute judge for federal appellate courts across the country. She’s moved from the marble palace of the Supreme Court to dreary local courtrooms. But she doesn’t mind: “It’s nice to keep your hand in a bit,” she told The Wall Street Journal. She’s heard almost 80 cases as a substitute judge—including a case on whether a drug dealer can escape punishment, and one on whether a wolf named Dutchess was rightly impounded. “Some fact-bound criminal case is not of special interest to me, I have to confess,” she says, adding that many of her cases are “not particularly demanding, intellectually.”