Sandra Day O'Connor

Associate justice of the United States (1981–2006)

• Born: March 26, 1930
• Place of Birth: El Paso, Texas
• Died: December 1, 2023
• Place of Death: Phoenix, Arizona

O’Connor served as an Arizona state legislator and judge before becoming the first female justice on the Supreme Court of the United States in 1981.

Early Life

Sandra Day O’Connor was born Sandra Day in El Paso, Texas, and grew up on a rustic cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona. The oldest of three children, Sandra Day’s early life was marked by hard work and academic excellence. She was reading by age four, and by age ten, she was riding horses, repairing fences, and driving tractors. She also developed studious habits as a youngster, reading the many magazines and books provided by her parents. Encouraged to value education by her college-educated mother, Ada Mae Wilkey Day, she was sent to live with her maternal grandmother to attend a private girls’ school in El Paso. Between the ages of six and fifteen, O’Connor typically spent summers with her parents on the ranch and school months away from home. Hardworking and self-reliant, she graduated from public high school in El Paso, Texas, at the relatively young age of sixteen.

O’Connor went immediately on to college, entering Stanford University in California, where she completed both her undergraduate and law degrees by the time she was twenty-two. She attained magna cum laude status for her BA degree in economics, and she ranked in the top 10 percent in her law school’s graduating class. One of the few women in the law school, she was chosen to be a member of the Society of the Coif, an exclusive honor society for superior students. She also served on the editorial staff of the highly regarded Stanford Law Review, and while there she met two fellow students who would play important roles in her life: John O’Connor III, whom she would marry, and William H. Rehnquist, with whom she would serve on the US Supreme Court for more than twenty-five years.

Life’s Work

After completing law school, Sandra Day O’Connor planned to practice law and interviewed with several of the traditionally all-male private law firms in California. Despite her strong academic credentials, the only offer she received was to serve as a legal secretary. She turned that offer down and began what was to become an extraordinary career in public service. She served briefly as deputy attorney for San Mateo County, California, before moving to West Germany because of her husband’s Army assignment. On returning to the United States, she proceeded to have and rear three sons, while maintaining a busy schedule of volunteer activities in Phoenix, Arizona. Still unable to secure a law firm position, she started a small private practice in Phoenix and became active in Republican Party politics in her county. Devoted to public service, she became one of Arizona’s assistant attorney generals in 1965 and then a state senator in 1969. At age forty-two, O’Connor became the first woman to hold the majority leader position in a state senate.

Although she enjoyed the respect of her state senate colleagues and the support of her constituents, O’Connor opted for the intellectual challenge of the judiciary over the political demands of the legislature. She successfully sought election in 1974 as a state trial judge, and four years later she was appointed by Governor Bruce Babbitt to the Arizona Court of Appeals. As both a state legislator and a judge, she developed a reputation as an extremely diligent, intelligent, and fair-minded public servant. Influenced in her youth by her father, Harry Day, who had an intense dislike for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the liberal policies of the Democratic Party, O’Connor became a loyal Republican Party activist, serving on the Arizona committee to reelect President Richard Nixon in 1972 and working for Ronald Reagan’s presidential nomination in 1976. Her judicial temperament, fidelity to the Republican Party, impressive academic credentials, and impeccable moral character made her a prime candidate for a federal court appointment.

No woman had served on the Supreme Court of the United States for the nearly two hundred years since its opening session in 1789. In fulfillment of a campaign pledge to appoint a qualified woman to the US Supreme Court, President Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor on July 7, 1981, to become the 106th justice in the Court’s history. This historic decision by President Reagan followed a three-month-long search headed by Attorney General William French Smith, who, ironically, had been a partner in one of the California law firms that had refused to hire O’Connor years before. Despite some questions that were raised about her relatively brief experience as an appellate court judge, and some concern about her views on abortion rights, her nomination was enthusiastically supported by both conservatives and liberals. O’Connor impressed members of the Senate Judiciary Committee with her careful and prudent approach to controversial legal issues, asserting her strong conservative belief that judges ought to restrain themselves from injecting personal values into their judicial decisions. Her merit on full display, she was confirmed by the US Senate by a vote of 99 to 0 in September 1981.

O’Connor served for twenty-five years as a distinguished and highly respected associate justice of the Supreme Court. As a new member of the Court in 1981, she immediately impressed colleagues with her disciplined work habits and dignified yet congenial manner. Shortly after arriving, she initiated an aerobics class in the Supreme Court gymnasium for all women employees, which she attended faithfully for many years. Although slowed by a bout with breast cancer in 1988, O’Connor maintained one of the most grueling work schedules of any justice throughout her career on the Court. Exceedingly well prepared for each case, she was noted for asking incisive questions during the Court’s oral argument and for producing written opinions expeditiously. She also was active off the court, regularly attending Washington, DC, social events with her husband, arranging family skiing trips, and lecturing widely on legal topics.

On the Supreme Court, O’Connor had a significant influence on many of the most controversial social and political issues of her time. She developed a reputation as a pragmatic justice who wrote moderately conservative judicial opinions. On the nine-member Court, she often cast the deciding vote, repeatedly discovering some reasonable middle-ground position between her more ideological liberal and conservative brethren. As a result, for much of her tenure, O’Connor was characterized as perhaps the most powerful woman in America, one whose vote would shape public policy in the areas of abortion rights, religious liberty, affirmative action, federalism, and women’s rights.

In one of her most important rulings, O’Connor defined the standard for state abortion regulations. Rejecting both the arguments of conservatives that the Constitution does not prevent states from prohibiting early-term abortions and the arguments of liberal feminists that states could place no constitutional restrictions on a woman’s right to choose an abortion, she ruled in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) that states could regulate abortion up to the point that these restrictions become an undue burden on the woman seeking the abortion. O’Connor’s deciding vote in this case maintained early-term abortion as a constitutional right even while allowing states to impose some conditions. In Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) she again cast a deciding vote in striking down a state law that banned a controversial (“partial birth”) late-term abortion procedure as insufficiently protective of the mother’s health. However, to underscore O’Connor’s importance in casting pivotal votes, in 2007, with O’Connor retired and replaced with a more conservative justice, Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court upheld a similar federal ban on “partial birth” abortion.

In the controversial area of religion, O’Connor was typically a voice of moderation. Against liberals who advocated a virtually total separation of religion from state activities and against conservatives who argued that the Constitution allows more active government support of religion, O’Connor articulated the position that a government policy violates the Constitution only if it intends, or appears, to endorse religion. In a case from 2002 involving public vouchers given to parents who used the money to send their children to parochial schools, O’Connor cast the decisive fifth vote ruling that vouchers did not violate the Constitution so long as the parents, and not the parochial schools, were the primary recipients of the government money.

O’Connor actively participated in moving the Court to a more conservative stance on affirmative action even while defending such programs against more conservative justices who would abolish them in all circumstances. In a case that displayed her sensitivity to discrimination against women as well as her support for some types of affirmative action programs, she argued in Johnson v. Transportation Agency of Santa Clara County (1987) against the complaint of a white man who was passed over for a skilled job in favor of a woman who, though well qualified, scored slightly lower on an interview score. At the time, none of the 237 skilled positions in the agency was held by a woman. For O’Connor, this was sufficient evidence that the county had discriminated against women. In subsequent cases, she sought to limit government affirmative action programs to those circumstances in which they serve a compelling interest. In 2003 O’Connor cast the deciding vote in Grutter v. Bollinger, ruling that state universities may use race-conscious affirmative action programs when admitting students to achieve the compelling interest of a “diverse” student body.

O’Connor was the only one of her colleagues on the Court to have been an elected state legislator. This fact, combined with her fundamentally conservative values, made O’Connor a strong advocate of limits on the power of the federal government over the states. Her conservative views on federalism emerged in such important decisions as Gregory v. Ashcroft (1991), in which, writing for the majority of the Court, O’Connor ruled that Missouri’s constitutional requirement of mandatory retirement for judges did not violate the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Similarly, in New York v. United States (1992), O’Connor’s majority opinion declared that the federal government could not order state governments to assume ownership of nuclear waste if they failed to create adequate disposal sites as required by federal law. She also believed in restraining the power of the federal government even where women’s rights may be compromised. In 2000, she joined a ruling to strike down the Violence Against Women Act, a federal law that would have allowed victims of sexual violence to bring civil suits against their attackers in federal court. Her views on federalism also shaped her rulings on capital punishment. Her rulings generally sided with the states in limiting death row appeals, though she did rule in Atkins v. Virginia (2002) that states may not execute individuals with mental disabilities.

O’Connor’s long-standing commitments to judicial impartiality and restraint and to state sovereignty came into question when she cast a deciding vote in the controversy surrounding the presidential election of 2000. The Supreme Court, splitting five to four in Bush v. Gore, ordered Florida to stop a recount of disputed ballots, resulting in the election of the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, and the defeat of the Democratic candidate, Al Gore. O’Connor rejected the Florida Supreme Court’s order for a recount, a vote that some critics viewed to be inconsistent with her abiding belief in state sovereignty. She, along with four of her Republican colleagues on the Court, withstood public criticism for participating in what many saw as an unprecedented, and partisan, intrusion of the Supreme Court into the election of a president.

On women’s rights, O’Connor stood forcefully for the principle that the Constitution mandates gender equality and that civil rights laws should be interpreted to protect women against discrimination in education and employment. As a state senator, she supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1993, Justice O’Connor wrote an opinion for a unanimous court in Harris v. Forklift Systems that made sexual harassment in the workplace easier to prove, and in 1999, in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education she cast the decisive fifth vote holding school officials liable for preventing student-on-student sexual harassment. Although she was not a liberal feminist, O’Connor’s efforts to preserve a woman’s constitutional right to choose abortion, her votes on the Court to end discrimination against pregnant workers, and her opposition to the exclusion of women from men’s private clubs demonstrated her commitment to gender equality.

In one of her last cases, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), O’Connor confronted the problem of individual rights in wartime, and the scope of the president’s powers in war. Writing for a divided court, in an opinion she later called one of her most important, she ruled that “a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens.”

In her last years on the Supreme Court, O’Connor managed to write three books, including a memoir of her formative years on the Arizona ranch. She announced her retirement from the Supreme Court on July 1, 2005, at the age of seventy-five, and she continued to serve until her replacement, Samuel Alito, was sworn in on January 31, 2006. After leaving the Court, she continued her public service as a member of the Iraq Study Group in 2006, as chancellor of the College of William and Mary from 2005 to 2012, and as a leading advocate for an independent judiciary at national and international conferences.

O'Connor received many awards honoring her achievements and public service. On July 30, 2009, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. She wrote several books, including Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest (2002), with H. Alan Day; The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice (2003), with Craig Joyce; and Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court (2013).

In October 2018, O'Connor announced that she had been diagnosed with early stages of dementia and would subsequently be retiring from public life. O’Connor died on December 1, 2023. She was ninety-three.

Significance

O’Connor’s path-breaking rise to the Supreme Court was a significant moment in the greater transformation of women’s lives in American society during the last half of the twentieth century. Her celebrated nomination to the Court, applauded by people of all political views, reflected the growing consensus that women were deserving of high governmental office and that they had been unjustly excluded from these positions for far too long. Her appointment to the Court also coincided with the increase in popularity of conservative political ideas in the 1980s, a trend to which she contributed.

O’Connor’s accomplishments go beyond the circumstances of her appointment. On the Court, she influenced many important areas of American law, often casting pivotal votes in highly controversial cases. Scholars have proposed that O’Connor lent a uniquely feminine perspective to cases heard by the Court, marked in part by her consistent ability to see both sides of complex issues and her tendency to forge a reasonable compromise that was consistent with her basic conservative values. Other scholars argued that several of the justices became noticeably more receptive to arguments in favor of gender equality after O’Connor’s arrival on the Court. O’Connor was joined by a second woman justice after President Bill Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court in 1993. Although women continue to be underrepresented in political office, O’Connor retained a unique public profile as one of the most popular and easily recognized Supreme Court Justices ever.

Bibliography

Biskupic, Joan. Sandra Day O’Connor. Harper, 2005.

Farmer, Ann. "Being First." Perspectives: A Magazine for & about Women Lawyers, vol. 22, no. 1, 201, pp. 4–7.

Greenburg, Jan Crawford. Supreme Conflict. Penguin, 2007.

Gutgold, Nichola D. The Rhetoric of Supreme Court Women: From Obstacles to Options. Lexington, 2012.

Landis, Kelly B. "From Courtroom to Classroom: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's Civics Learning Revolution." Judges' Journal, vol. 51, no. 3, 2012, pp. 20–24.

Maveety, Nancy. “Justice Sandra O’Connor: Accommodationism and Conservatism.” Rehnquist Justice: Understanding the Court Dynamic. Edited by Earl Maltz, UP of Kansas, 2003.

O’Connor, Sandra Day, and Craig Joyce. The Majesty of the Law. Random, 2003.

O’Connor, Sandra Day, and H. Alan Day. Lazy B. Random, 2002.

Swers, Michele L., and Kim, Christine C. "Replacing Sandra Day O'Connor: Gender and the Politics of Supreme Court Nominations." Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, vol. 34, no. 1, 2013, pp. 23–48.

Tushnet, Mark. A Court Divided. Norton, 2005.

Van der Vort, E. "Finding Liberty's Refuge: Balancing the State and the Individual on the O'Connor Court." Conference Papers—New England Political Science Association, 2011, pp. 1–67.