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Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor reflects on long and illustrious career
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: February 3, 2023
Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, whose law practice started in Summit County, has retired from the bench after a long career in public service dedicated to justice and to helping the less fortunate. She was the t10th chief justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio and the first woman to hold that position.
But even with her plethora of high points in the judicial and political worlds, Chief Justice O’Connor never set a career path to sit on the Supreme Court bench, or even to have a career in politics.
“I didn’t start out to be a judge, or a prosecutor, or anything else,” she said. “Opportunities just presented themselves along the way.”
Those opportunities, in the end, saw her become one of the most powerful decision-makers in Ohio history. She was also, she said, the only chief justice to actually retire and not lose the seat in an election or die in office.
Chief Justice O’Connor sat on the Supreme Court as an associate justice from 2002 to 2010, and as chief justice from 2010 until Dec. 31, 2022.
She is ineligible to run for a judgeship of any kind under Ohio law because of her age. But she probably will not be slowing down.
John Adams, a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio is an old friend whose career parallels hers. He said that “at 71, she’s still as vibrant as ever.”
Chief Justice O’Connor grew up in Strongsville in the western suburbs of Cleveland and graduated from Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. She said that she considered several careers at that point, including not doing much of anything other than traveling around. But, she said, she applied to one law school and got in. So that was the direction she chose.
After she received her juris doctorate from Cleveland State University Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1980, she was open to where her law career might go. She began a private law practice in Summit County, concentrating on probate work, taking court assignments and learning the ropes.
“I tried to do what good that I could do, to help people in trouble,” she said of her private practice, which emphasized defense work, guardianships, work with the mental health system, estates and, particularly, adoptions.
“I had a varied caseload that allowed me to learn and grow and I really enjoyed my time there.”
To George Wertz, chief magistrate at Summit County Probate Court, Chief Justice O’Connor stood out for her work ethic, dedication and demeanor.
“She always knew exactly how much to push to get her point across,” he said. “Above all, she was simply collegial, a characteristic that goes a long way in the tight-knit Summit County legal community,” said Wertz. “I just enjoyed being around her.”
In 1985, an opening arose for a magistrate at Summit County Probate Court. Wertz and the court staff conducted a search and, to Wertz, the choice became obvious. Chief Justice O’Connor stood above all the other candidates, he said..
“We offered her the job and she took it,” he said. “And the rest is history.”
She took the job because it gave her the ability to help people—not because she had any ambitions for higher office, she said.
“George Wentz suggested that I apply,” she said, “and I thought that it would be a way to use my law degree for public service.”
Judge Adams said that believes that Chief Justice O’Connor can look back particularly fondly at her time as probate court magistrate, especially in her close work in adoptions, and she said she agrees.
“I did take a lot of joy in the adoptions that I handled when I was a magistrate in probate court for almost nine years,” she said.
Judge Adams noted that she famously travelled to Korea twice for adoption cases.
“I visited the orphanages and learned about the operation of the program,” she said. “I met with the director and staff and the women who cared for the children.
“At the end of both trips, I helped escort babies to their waiting adoptive parents in the US. Two adults and six babies made for a hectic 17-hour flight,” she said.
At the end of every adoption, she said she had the child come up to the bench to put the seal on the adoption papers when possible.
But after nearly nine years as a magistrate, she was ready for a new challenge.
In 1993 she ran for judge of the Summit County Common Pleas Court with the backing of the local Republican Party. She won by an overwhelming majority.
“I thought I would be a common pleas judge for the rest of my career,” she said.
But very soon another opportunity came along—an opening for Summit County Prosecutor.
“I thought that that was a really important part of the justice system,” she said,particularly with her background in working as a defense attorney and with minors.
The Summit County Prosecutor’s Office runs Child Support Enforcement Agency (CSEA), and she thought that she could help getting that agency organized.
She said that “everyone thought I was crazy” to run for the position. But run she did, and, like in all of her elections, she won.
Far from being “crazy,” her work with the prosecutor’s office and CSEA were seminal for her in developing the high-level organizational skills that would mark the rest of her career.
“Looking back on this, CSEA is second only to the school system in its effect on children. Because I put the right people in to manage the agency and they did their job, we had success. My role was to get the right people in and then to let them do their jobs,” she said.
Over the course of her career in public service, Chief Justice O’Connor said she always sought both consensus among her peers (without sacrificing her own sense of justice and the law), and teams of experts to advise and complete the various jobs of running whatever office she held.
This also filtered down to all of the projects that she undertook or helped with at the Supreme Court.
But her next career stop was one that she said she could not have foreseen when she got accepted to law school.
In 1998, she was put into the running for the position of lieutenant governor on the ticket with Bob Taft. Again, she said, “my name came up. I checked all the boxes—woman, law enforcement background, from northeast Ohio and I could get elected.”
She said that she would have been perfectly happy to stay in Summit County as prosecutor for the rest of her career. But, again, she and her ticket won the election.
And again, her career quickly took another shift.
In 2002, she ran for a position as a justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. She won that election and began serving in that position in 2003. She was re-elected in 2008, and then ran for the chief justice position in 2010. She won that election with nearly 70% of the vote. She ran unopposed in 2016.
She may be known nationally for only one set of decisions: Continually striking down Ohio voting maps as illegal gerrymandering. But in her time at the court, she took the lead on numerous justice projects and was one of the country’s leading proponents for upgrading court technology.
Chief Justice O’Connor’s official Supreme Court biography calls her “the architect of the modern courts in Ohio.”
“As chief justice,” she said. “I expanded the use of court technology. I saw that technology could be consequential and could be a difference maker for local courts.”
Her vision of helping local courts upgrade their technology led to the creation of a Supreme Court-funded program that has given almost $40 million to those courts. She also led the program to install a court management system for all of the Ohio appellate courts. Her foresight allowed Ohio’s courts to function during COVID-19, especially in the use of remote access to the courts.
Even in administering the Supreme Court, she kept to the organizational model she developed in Summit County.
“I hired people smarter than me and let them do what they do,” she said. “I got involved, I asked questions and I expected them to be prepared.”
And her accomplishments followed suit.
She is past president of the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators. Among many other accomplishments in the state, she took the lead in bail reform and in establishing a statewide criminal sentencing database. She initiated a regional consortium to work together to combat the opioid epidemic. She oversaw a large increase in the use of specialized dockets in local courts.
Her time on the Supreme Court may be over, but she has shown every indication of continuing a life of public service.
For the time being, she said, she is taking four months off from doing anything.
But don’t expect her to stop her public life.
She may just be beginning.