Justice O'Connor also began her career voting with the High Court's most conservative member at that time -- William Rehnquist -- more than four-fifths of the time. But she too moved leftward over the years, often providing the fifth vote needed by the court's liberal justices to prevail. She too was now lauded in the media.

Although Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure, precisely in order to give them independence, nothing can give anyone the backbone and character to stand up to criticism or to resist the blandishments of flattery and lionizing.

All the pressures are to move to the left, in accordance with the views of the liberal media and the liberal professors who dominate the law schools.

Judges who stick to the Constitution as it was written and resist the pressures to enact the agenda of the left from the bench will be depicted as narrow, dull, perhaps even stupid or morally lacking. But those who drift with the leftward tide can count on being portrayed as compassionate, brilliant or even profound.

Does this matter to federal judges with lifetime tenure? One such judge, Circuit Court Judge Laurence Silberman, has said flatly, from what he has seen, that it does.

Perhaps the most influential journalist who denigrates conservative judges and lionizes those on the left is New York Times legal reporter Linda Greenhouse.

The susceptibility of judges to such journalistic influence in general was dubbed "the Greenhouse effect," for Linda Greenhouse, in this column 15 years ago but Jan Crawford Greenburg attributes it to Judge Silberman.

He is the one who deserves credit for identifying this judicial weakness, which is more important than coining the phrase.