Sandra Day O'Connor

Based on Wikipedia: Sandra Day O'Connor

The Cowgirl Who Changed American Law

Before she became the most powerful woman in America, Sandra Day learned to shoot coyotes on a cattle ranch so remote it had no electricity until she was seven years old. She drove trucks as soon as she could see over the dashboard. She changed her own flat tires on dirt roads nine miles from the nearest pavement.

This wasn't frontier mythology. This was Arizona in the 1930s.

Sandra Day O'Connor would carry that rancher's pragmatism all the way to the Supreme Court, where for a quarter century she held American jurisprudence in her hands. As the Court's decisive swing vote, her opinion often became the law of the land. On abortion, affirmative action, campaign finance, and the outcome of a presidential election, O'Connor's vote was frequently the only one that mattered.

Her path there was anything but assured. When she graduated near the top of her Stanford Law School class in 1952, not a single law firm would hire her—because she was a woman. One prestigious firm offered her a position. As a secretary.

A Ranch at the Edge of Nowhere

The Lazy B Ranch sprawled across nearly two hundred thousand acres of high desert along the Arizona-New Mexico border. Sandra was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1930, but the ranch shaped her. Her father Harry was a cattleman. Her mother Ada Mae had grown up in more comfortable circumstances and never fully adapted to the isolation.

The nearest town was Duncan, Arizona. The nearest paved road was almost ten miles away.

Because the ranch was too far from any school, Sandra spent most of her childhood living with her maternal grandmother in El Paso, attending a private girls' school. She returned to the ranch for holidays and summers, and for one year in eighth grade she rode a bus thirty-two miles each way to school. She had two younger siblings—her sister Ann, who would later serve a decade in the Arizona Legislature, and her brother Alan, a lifelong rancher. Decades later, she and Alan would write a memoir together called Lazy B, about those formative years in the desert.

Sandra graduated sixth in her class from Austin High School in El Paso. She was sixteen years old.

Stanford: Where Everything Changed

Stanford accepted her, and she earned a bachelor's degree in economics in just three years, graduating magna cum laude—Latin for "with great praise," an honor reserved for the top tier of graduates. But it was law school that captured her ambition.

At Stanford Law, she encountered two people who would shape her future. The first was Professor Harry Rathbun, whose teaching inspired her to pursue law seriously. The second was a fellow student named William Rehnquist, who edited the Stanford Law Review while she served on its staff. Rehnquist would later become Chief Justice of the United States, and for nearly two decades, O'Connor would sit beside him on the nation's highest court.

She also met John Jay O'Connor III, a law student one year behind her. They married at the Lazy B Ranch six months after her graduation, in December 1952.

The Door That Wouldn't Open

O'Connor graduated in 1952 ranked third in her class. She had achieved the Order of the Coif, a prestigious legal honor society that admits only the top ten percent of law graduates. By any measure, she was an exceptional young attorney.

None of it mattered to the law firms.

Firm after firm refused to interview her. The problem wasn't her credentials. The problem was her gender. This was 1952. Women simply didn't work as lawyers at major firms. One firm—Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher in Los Angeles—finally agreed to meet with her. They offered her a job as a legal secretary.

She found a different path. San Mateo County in California needed a deputy county attorney. O'Connor offered to work for free, without even an office—she'd share space with a secretary. The county agreed. Within months, she proved herself valuable enough to earn a small salary, doing legal research and writing memoranda alongside the district attorney.

Building a Life in Arizona

When John was drafted into the Army, Sandra went with him. They spent three years in Germany, where she worked as a civilian attorney for the Army's Quartermaster Corps, the branch responsible for supplies and logistics. After returning to the United States, they settled in Maricopa County, Arizona—the county that contains Phoenix.

O'Connor started a small law firm. She and John had three sons: Scott in 1958, Brian in 1960, and Jay in 1962. After Brian's birth, she stepped away from legal practice for five years. But she didn't step away from public life. She volunteered with the Maricopa County Young Republicans and worked on Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. Goldwater, Arizona's conservative senator, would lose to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, but the connections O'Connor made would serve her well.

Into the Arena

In 1965, O'Connor became an Assistant Attorney General of Arizona—a position that put her inside the machinery of state government. Four years later, the governor appointed her to fill a vacant seat in the Arizona State Senate. She won election to the seat the following year, and then won again.

By 1973, she had risen to majority leader of the Arizona Senate. This made her the first woman in American history to lead a state legislative chamber. She earned a reputation as a skilled negotiator and a moderate—someone who could work across party lines to get things done.

After two full terms, she decided she wanted to be a judge.

The Bench Before the Highest Bench

In 1974, O'Connor was appointed to the Maricopa County Superior Court, a trial-level court where judges hear everything from divorces to murders. She served there until 1979, when she was elevated to the Arizona Court of Appeals, which reviews decisions from the trial courts below.

One case from her trial court years would have haunting consequences. In late 1977 and early 1978, she presided over an aggravated assault case against Clarence Dixon, a twenty-two-year-old Arizona State University student who had attacked a fifteen-year-old girl with a metal pipe. O'Connor found Dixon not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered him committed to a state hospital.

But there was a four-day gap between her ruling and Dixon's transfer to the hospital.

During those four days, Dixon raped and murdered a twenty-one-year-old woman named Deana Lynne Bowdoin. He wasn't identified as her killer until 2001, when DNA evidence finally connected him to the crime. Dixon was executed in 2022.

Reagan's Promise

During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan made a pledge: if elected, he would appoint the first woman to the Supreme Court. It was a calculated political move. Reagan was trying to close a significant gender gap in the polls, and the promise of a female justice appealed to moderate voters concerned about women's rights.

When Justice Potter Stewart announced his retirement in 1981, Reagan had a promise to keep.

On July 6, 1981, the president called O'Connor to tell her she was his nominee. She hadn't known she was even a finalist for the position. Reagan wrote in his diary that night: "Called Judge O'Connor and told her she was my nominee for supreme court. Already the flak is starting and from my own supporters. Right to Life people say she is pro abortion. She declares abortion is personally repugnant to her. I think she'll make a good justice."

The flak Reagan mentioned was substantial. Anti-abortion groups had examined O'Connor's record in the Arizona Legislature and found troubling signs. In 1970, she had cast a preliminary vote in favor of a bill to repeal Arizona's criminal abortion statute. In 1974, she had opposed a measure restricting abortions at some Arizona hospitals. Conservative activists suspected—correctly, as it would turn out—that she would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.

The Opposition

The Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and one of the most influential evangelical leaders in America, spoke out against her. So did Howard Phillips and Peter Gemma. Gemma, who ran the National Pro-Life Political Action Committee, called the nomination "a direct contradiction of the Republican platform to everything that candidate Reagan said."

Several Republican senators called the White House to express their displeasure. Don Nickles of Oklahoma said that he and "other profamily Republican senators would not support O'Connor." Jesse Helms of North Carolina, one of the Senate's most conservative members, was similarly displeased.

None of it mattered.

Reagan formally submitted the nomination on August 19, 1981. The confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee began on September 9—the first Supreme Court confirmation hearing ever televised. For three days, senators pressed O'Connor on her views about abortion. She refused to reveal how she might rule, careful not to appear either for or against abortion rights.

The committee approved her seventeen to zero, with one senator voting "present."

On September 21, the full Senate confirmed Sandra Day O'Connor by a vote of ninety-nine to zero. The only senator absent was Max Baucus of Montana, who sent her a copy of Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It by way of apology.

Even Nickles, Helms, and the other conservative opponents voted yes. They couldn't bring themselves to vote against the first woman nominated to the Supreme Court.

First Woman on the Supreme Court

O'Connor took her seat on the Court aware that she was representing something larger than herself. She felt a responsibility, she later said, to demonstrate that women could do the job. The practical challenges started immediately. There was no women's restroom near the courtroom. She had to have one installed.

In her first year, O'Connor received over sixty thousand letters from the public—more than any justice in the Court's history. She had become a symbol.

Two years in, the New York Times published an editorial referring to "the nine men" of the Supreme Court. O'Connor wrote a letter to the editor, reminding them that the Court was no longer composed of nine men. She signed it "FWOTSC"—First Woman on the Supreme Court.

She had a sense of humor about her unique position. But she also worked hard to build relationships with her colleagues. O'Connor was a proponent of collegiality, often insisting that the justices eat lunch together. In a job where nine people must work together for decades, personal relationships matter.

The Swing Vote

Understanding O'Connor's role on the Court requires understanding how the Supreme Court actually works.

The Court has nine justices. To decide a case, you need a majority—at least five votes. When O'Connor joined in 1981, the Court had a mix of liberals and conservatives, but the balance could shift depending on the issue. A "swing vote" is a justice who doesn't reliably side with either the liberal or conservative bloc. That justice's vote often determines the outcome.

In her early years, O'Connor voted closely with William Rehnquist, her old Stanford Law Review colleague, siding with him eighty-seven percent of the time in her first three years. This wasn't surprising. Both were Arizona conservatives who had come up through similar legal and political circles.

But as the Court's composition changed—as more conservative justices replaced more moderate ones—O'Connor found herself increasingly in the middle. When Anthony Kennedy replaced Lewis Powell in 1988, and when Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall in 1991, the Court shifted rightward. O'Connor didn't move with it.

Or rather, she didn't move as far.

From 1994 to 2004, she joined the conservative bloc in contentious five-to-four decisions eighty-two times. She joined the liberal bloc only twenty-eight times. She was still fundamentally conservative. But in a Court where every close case hinged on a single vote, those twenty-eight times represented enormous power.

A Complicated Relationship with Clarence Thomas

O'Connor's shift away from the Court's most conservative members may have been partly a reaction to Clarence Thomas. When Thomas joined the Court in 1991, his views were significantly to the right of even the other conservatives. O'Connor seemed uncomfortable with his approach.

When they voted on the same side of a case, O'Connor typically wrote her own separate opinion rather than joining his. During the 1992 term, she didn't join a single one of Thomas's dissenting opinions. This was unusual. Justices who agree on an outcome usually join each other's opinions. O'Connor's refusal to do so sent a signal.

The Cases That Defined Her

O'Connor's influence can be measured in the cases where her vote—or her opinion—made the difference.

Abortion: Preserving Roe Without Embracing It

The conservative activists who opposed O'Connor's nomination feared she would protect abortion rights. They were right, though perhaps not in the way they expected.

In 1989, in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, O'Connor voted to uphold state restrictions on second-trimester abortions. This seemed like a step toward overturning Roe. But in a concurring opinion, she refused to explicitly call for Roe to be overturned. She was willing to chip away at abortion rights, but not to demolish them entirely.

Three years later came Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the case that would define the abortion debate for a generation. Many expected the Court to finally overturn Roe. The votes seemed to be there.

Instead, O'Connor joined with Kennedy and David Souter to write a joint opinion that preserved the core of Roe while modifying its framework. The opinion replaced Roe's trimester system with a new standard: states could regulate abortion, but they couldn't impose an "undue burden" on a woman's right to choose before the fetus was viable outside the womb.

It was a compromise. Neither side was happy. But abortion remained legal in America for another three decades, in large part because of O'Connor's vote.

Affirmative Action: Drawing Fine Lines

In 2003, O'Connor wrote the majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, one of the most significant affirmative action cases in American history.

The case involved the University of Michigan Law School, which considered race as one factor among many in its admissions process. The question was whether this violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires the government to treat people equally regardless of race.

O'Connor ruled that the law school's approach was constitutional. Diversity in higher education, she wrote, was a "compelling interest" that could justify considering race in admissions—as long as the process was narrowly tailored and didn't amount to a quota system. She added a notable prediction: she expected that in twenty-five years, affirmative action would no longer be necessary.

That twenty-five-year window expired in 2028. But the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, just months before O'Connor's death.

In a companion case decided the same day, Gratz v. Bollinger, O'Connor joined the majority in striking down the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions program. That program awarded points based on race in a more mechanical way that the Court found unconstitutional. Together, the two cases drew a fine line: considering race as one flexible factor was acceptable; using race as a rigid formula was not.

Bush v. Gore: The Decision That Chose a President

The 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore came down to Florida. The margin was impossibly thin—a few hundred votes out of nearly six million cast. The Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount. The question reached the U.S. Supreme Court: should the recount continue?

On December 12, 2000, the Court ruled five to four to stop the recount. The decision effectively made George W. Bush president.

O'Connor was part of the five-justice majority.

The decision was controversial from the moment it was announced. Legal scholars debated whether the Court should have intervened at all in what was essentially a state election matter. Some argued that O'Connor should have recused herself—removed herself from the case—because of apparent bias. On election night, when television networks initially called Florida for Gore, O'Connor had reportedly become visibly upset, and her husband had explained to others at a party that they would have to wait another four years before retiring to Arizona.

O'Connor expressed surprise that the decision became so controversial. Some people in Washington stopped shaking her hand afterward. The playwright Arthur Miller confronted her about it at the Kennedy Center.

Three Strikes: When Fifty Years Isn't Cruel

In Lockyer v. Andrade, O'Connor wrote a majority opinion that revealed the limits of her moderate reputation.

Leandro Andrade was a father of three and a nine-year Army veteran. He shoplifted about one hundred fifty dollars worth of children's videotapes from two different Kmart stores. Under California's "three strikes" law, which imposed severe sentences on repeat offenders, he was sentenced to fifty years to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Andrade argued that this was "cruel and unusual punishment" under the Eighth Amendment. O'Connor, writing for a five-to-four majority, disagreed. Because there was no "clearly established" legal principle that such a sentence was unconstitutional, the federal courts couldn't intervene.

Andrade will be eligible for parole in 2046. He will be eighty-seven years old.

Retirement and Legacy

On July 1, 2005, O'Connor announced her retirement, effective when the Senate confirmed her successor. Her husband John had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and she wanted to spend his remaining years with him.

President George W. Bush initially nominated John Roberts to replace her. But when Chief Justice Rehnquist died in September 2005, Bush shifted Roberts to the Chief Justice seat and nominated Samuel Alito to fill O'Connor's position. Alito joined the Court on January 31, 2006.

The shift from O'Connor to Alito moved the Court significantly to the right. Alito was a more reliable conservative vote than O'Connor had been. Many of the close cases that O'Connor had decided in favor of more moderate outcomes would likely have gone differently with Alito in her seat.

After the Court

Retirement didn't mean withdrawal. O'Connor succeeded Henry Kissinger as chancellor of the College of William and Mary, the second-oldest college in America. In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

She became an advocate for civic education, concerned that Americans didn't understand how their government worked. She helped create iCivics, a nonprofit that develops educational video games to teach students about government and citizenship.

In 2018, O'Connor announced that she had been diagnosed with dementia, probably Alzheimer's disease—the same condition that had afflicted her husband John, who died in 2009. She withdrew from public life.

Sandra Day O'Connor died on December 1, 2023, at the age of ninety-three. At the time of her death, she was the last surviving member of the Burger Court—the Supreme Court as it existed under Chief Justice Warren Burger, before Rehnquist took over in 1986.

The Meaning of a Swing Vote

O'Connor's legacy is complicated precisely because she was a swing vote.

To liberals, she was the justice who stopped the Court from going further right on abortion, who preserved affirmative action, who occasionally checked executive power in the war on terror. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, she wrote the majority opinion declaring that American citizens detained as enemy combatants had the right to challenge their detention in court. "A state of war is not a blank check for the President," she wrote.

To conservatives, she was one of their own who sometimes went wobbly. She upheld parts of campaign finance laws they opposed. She refused to overturn Roe. She supported affirmative action.

To legal scholars, she was frustrating in a different way. Her opinions often decided the case in front of her without establishing clear rules for future cases. She preferred narrow, fact-specific decisions to sweeping pronouncements. This made her influential in the moment but left the law uncertain.

Perhaps that was the rancher's pragmatism showing through. On the Lazy B, you dealt with the problem in front of you. You didn't theorize about abstract principles. You fixed the fence, moved the cattle, shot the coyote.

O'Connor approached the law the same way. Each case was a problem to be solved, not an opportunity to reshape constitutional doctrine. Whether that made her a great justice or merely an influential one depends on what you think the Supreme Court is for.

What's beyond debate is this: the girl from the ranch with no running water became the most powerful woman in American government. When she voted, presidents won elections and constitutional rights survived or fell. For a quarter century, Sandra Day O'Connor held the deciding vote on what the Constitution meant.

Not bad for someone who started her legal career sharing an office with a secretary, working for free.