Sandra Day O'Connor

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(b. El Paso, Tex., 26 Mar. 1930), associate justice, 1981–. Nominated by President Ronald Reagan and unanimously approved by the Senate, Sandra Day O'Connor joined the Court on 25 September 1981 as its 102nd justice and first female appointee.

The oldest of three children, O'Connor grew up on the Lazy B, the family's 160,000 acre ranch in southern Arizona and New Mexico. Her father, Harry A. Day, was an excellent student and California high school swimming champion whose plan to attend college yielded first to military service in World War I and then to management of the Lazy B ranch when his father became ill. Her mother, Ada Mae Wilkey Day, attended the University of Arizona and was an intelligent, caring woman devoted to the family's well‐being. The challenge of ranch life against the stark beauty of the southwestern desert instilled in the future justice her lifelong values of determination, honesty, hard work, and service to others.

After attending boarding school in El Paso, O'Connor entered Stanford at the age of sixteen. At the end of her junior year, she was accepted for early admission to Stanford Law School, where she graduated in 1952, third in her class behind the valedictorian, William H. Rehnquist. She met her husband, John O'Connor, while they were both law students at Stanford. They have three sons.

Like many other justices, O'Connor's path to the Court encompassed both the practice of law and politics. While her husband served in West Germany in the Judge Advocate General's Corps, she worked as a civilian quartermaster corps staff attorney. Returning to Arizona, O'Connor was an assistant attorney general from 1965 to 1969, when the governor appointed her to fill a vacancy in the Arizona Senate. Within three years she was the first woman in the United States to be a state senate majority leader. In 1974 she moved from state politics to the bench with her election to the Maricopa County Superior Court, where she was seen as a “rising star.” Her judicial demeanor, legal knowledge, and popularity led to an appointment to the Arizona Court of Appeals in 1979.

Active in Republican Party politics, O'Connor supported Ronald Reagan in his 1976 attempt to gain the presidential nomination over Gerald Ford. In 1981, at a time when the role of women in American society was growing, President Reagan‘s appointment of O'Connor fulfilled a campaign promise to appoint a woman to the Court. That opportunity came with the resignation of Potter Stewart.

From the outset, O'Connor was committed to conservative values: adherence to the “rule of law” to ensure that social change is deliberate and incremental; the exercise of judicial restraint to give proper heed to the legislative process; a theory of federalism that recognizes the primacy of states' rights; and the safeguarding of certain personal freedoms that must remain beyond the reach of government. In general, her votes on cases have been closely aligned with Chief Justice Rehnquist. In the 2003 term, they agreed over 80 percent of the time. Nevertheless, O'Connor's commitment to the constitutional mandate of “case and controversy” has been such that she is not identified with a particular ideology as much as she appears committed to a careful analysis of the facts and issues presented. Perhaps her view of the law is summarized in her comment in *Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia (1995): “When bedrock principles collide, they test the limits of categorical obstinacy and expose the flaws and dangers of a Grand Unified Theory that may turn out to be neither grand nor unified.” With this reputation for case‐by‐case decision making, she is perceived as a possible “swing vote” in high profile cases. In McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003), for example, O'Connor parted ways with Rehnquist and Scalia and their free speech arguments, agreeing instead with a five‐justice majority that regulation of campaign activity, not speech, was the core issue and that Congress's political expertise in the federal election process was entitled to deference by the Court.

O'Connor has shaped constitutional law in several areas including affirmative action, voting rights, church‐and‐state issues, takings under the Fifth Amendment, states' rights, and abortion. In one sense, her tenure on the bench and the sheer volume of her published opinions might suggest an “evolving” or “dynamic” jurisprudence on her part. On the other hand, there is much to support the notion that O'Connor has not changed her thinking as much as she has employed collegiality and the use of concurring opinions to bring the other justices over to her point of view.

In affirmative action cases, O'Connor's judicial philosophy has accommodated both text and social context. In Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education (1986), nonminority teachers challenged a policy that used race as a basis in determining layoffs. Because the statute overlooked the more limited use of hiring controls to address discrimination, a plurality of the Court held the policy violated the Equal Protection Clause. In her concurring opinion, O'Connor highlighted the majority's apparent consensus that race‐based classifications were constitutionally suspect regardless of their objective and reiterated that the proper inquiry was whether the challenged statute was narrowly drawn and survived strict scrutiny. This concurrence in Wygant was the basis of her majority opinions in subsequent cases that have substantially rewritten the law of affirmative action. In Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co. (1989), she applied Wygant to strike down an ordinance that required 30 percent of city contracting work go to minority‐owned businesses where there was no factual basis to connect the ordinance's remedial goals to local discrimination. In *Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña (1995), an O'Connor opinion placed Fifth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment claims on the same footing and required both federal and state contract set‐aside programs to undergo “strict scrutiny” analysis for equal protection purposes.

Two higher education cases, both 5‐to‐4 decisions, reconfirmed the role played by cultural diversity with regard to remedial affirmative action programs. In *Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), O'Connor authored the majority opinion that found a compelling state interest in promoting diversity and upheld the University of Michigan Law School's “narrowly tailored” admission policy that allowed race‐based consideration of an applicant's credentials. In Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), decided the same day, she joined a different majority to hold that, in the context of undergraduate admissions, an automatic award of admission points to minority applicants did not pass muster under the Equal Protection Clause.

In voting‐rights cases, viewpoints from her early years on the bench have ostensibly resurfaced and taken hold. In Davis v. Bandemer (1986), O'Connor dissented from the majority's holding that political gerrymandering claims were justiciable under the Equal Protection Clause. For her, the judiciary, as a coequal branch of government, was neither constitutionally authorized nor practically equipped to oversee an inherently political and policy‐laden process. In Vieth v. Jubelirer (2004), the Court again journeyed into the political thicket of legislative apportionment, but this time declined to find that partisan gerrymandering claims presented justiciable equal protection violations. O'Connor's abstentionist approach in Bandemer garnered three additional votes and set the framework for Anthony Kennedy's due process–based concurrence. In contrast, in Shaw v. Reno (1993), O'Connor still recognized a distinction in voting‐rights cases where the claim involved racial gerrymandering. Writing for a five‐justice majority, she opined that legislative‐apportionment schemes designed to protect voting rights against race‐based abuse might be valid if they satisfied strict scrutiny and narrowly drawn standards, but still cautioned against oddly shaped districts and the greater social harm that might arise from the very process of racial classifications.

In an Establishment Clause case, Lynch v. Donnelly (1984), decided during her third year on the Court, she offered “endorsement” analysis as a reformulation of the three‐prong test in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). This endorsement analysis was used in County of *Allegheny v. ACLU (1989) and it informed the Court's later approval of elementary school student voucher programs in Zelman v. Simmons‐Harris (2002).

The Takings Clause received fact‐intensive and insightful analysis by O'Connor in Eastern Enterprises v. Apfel (1998). Writing for the majority, she accepted the argument that an improper taking arose from Congress's attempt to fund lifetime health benefits under the Coal Industry Retiree Health Benefit Act of 1992 because Eastern had left the coal industry in 1965 and could not have foreseen future liability by subsequently enacted legislation. In reaching this conclusion, her examination of the Takings Clause correlated the issues of retroactivity, investment‐return expectations, disproportionate impact, and the notion of economic fairness set forth in Armstrong v. United States (1960). In contrast to Eastern, she ruled in favor of the legislature's eminent domain authority in Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff (1984), where the issue was the meaning of the Fifth Amendment's “public use” requirement. In the mid‐1960s, the Hawaii Legislature discovered that almost 50 percent of its island real estate was in the hands of seventy‐two private landowners. To remedy the stifling economic effects of this land oligarchy, the state devised a plan by which residential tracts were condemned and then resold to tenant‐homeowners. For O'Connor, the legislature, not the judiciary, was best equipped to determine land‐use policy and its determinations were entitled to validation. The “public‐use” requirement could be satisfied even though private ownership would result since the overall purpose of the taking was to promote the general welfare.

In a states' rights case, New York v. United States (1992), her methodical analysis of the Tenth Amendment invalidated federal legislation that would have compelled New York to take possession of low‐level radioactive wastes. In Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida (1996), she sided with a five‐justice majority in sustaining Florida's Eleventh Amendment claim that Congress could not use the Indian Commerce Clause to abrogate state immunity from suit.

In the area of abortion rights, she was the focal point of much public debate when the basic holding of Roe v. Wade (1973) was tested in *Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). Again in a 5‐to‐4 decision, O'Connor departed from her conservative stripes and applied the “undue burden” standard she first offered in her dissent in Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, Inc. (1983). Conceding the government some regulatory control over the abortion decision with regard to informed consent and parental approval provisions, her opinion for a splintered majority in Casey nevertheless upheld Roe’s recognition of a “liberty” interest in a woman's right to choose.

In terms of percentages, O'Connor files the fewest dissents compared to the other justices. That she endeavors to work to consensus perhaps underscores the significance of her disagreements with the majority. In Blakely v. Washington (2004), the Court struck down a state sentence enhancement scheme that allowed the judge, not the jury, to determine facts that increased the penalty above the statutory limit. Consistent with her dissent in Apprendi v. New Jersey (2000), O'Connor decried the majority's misunderstanding of the proper role of the judge and jury and chided its subversion of much‐needed sentencing guidelines that mediate an overloaded criminal justice system.

As American society continues to change and pose even more difficult legal questions with regard to the role of government and the rights of the individual, O'Connor's contribution to the Court will no doubt receive considerable attention and reexamination. Legal scholars may well debate whether she is unique in how she unpredictably combines both centrist and independent viewpoints in her opinions. Her views on law and society will set the contours of future pronouncements of the Court and she will continue to gain in stature as a great jurist.

Bibliography

• Henry J. Abraham, Justices, Presidents, and Senators (1999).
• Nancy Maveety, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: Strategist on the Supreme Court (1996).
• Sandra Day O'Connor and H. Alan Day, Lazy B (2002).
• Sandra Day O'Connor, The Majesty of the Law (2003). Symposium: Justice O'Connor: Twenty Years of Shaping Constitutional Law, McGeorge Law Review 32 (2001): 821–956

— George T. Anagnost

In 1981 Sandra Day O'Connor (born 1930) became the first woman to serve as a justice of the United States Supreme Court.

During the final month of the 1980 presidential campaign, candidate Ronald Reagan, whose polls disclosed a lack of support among female voters, announced that, if elected, he would appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. In July 1981 President Reagan kept that promise, nominating Sandra Day O'Connor to become the first female justice in the 191-year history of the court.

Born on August 26, 1930, Sandra Day spent her earliest years on her family's Lazy B Ranch in southeastern Arizona. She was considered a "child of the frontier" as her first home had no electricity or running water. She grew up branding steer, learning to fix whatever was broken and absorbing the influence of her family's vast Arizona cattle ranch built on former Apache land.

Then, because of parental concern that this obviously bright girl could not get an adequate education in rural schools, she went to live with her maternal grandmother in El Paso, Texas. There she attended the private Radford School for girls and Austin High. In 1946 she enrolled at Stanford University, where she studied economics and graduated magna cum laudein 1950. A year before receiving her B.A. she entered the law school, from which she received an LL.B. in 1952. A member of the board of editors of the Stanford Law Review, Day graduated third in a class of 102, two places behind her future Supreme Court colleague William H. Rehnquist.

Pre-Court Career

Despite her outstanding academic record, she failed in efforts to obtain employment as a lawyer with San Francisco and Los Angeles law firms because she was a woman. The only one willing to hire the future justice at all offered her a job as a legal secretary. Instead, she took a position as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California. When her new husband, John O'Connor, who was one class behind her at Stanford, finished law school the couple headed for Germany, where he served as an attorney in the Army, and she worked as a civilian quartermaster corps attorney, specializing in contracts.

Upon their return to the United States the O'Connors settled in the Phoenix, Arizona area. O'Connor and another lawyer opened a law office in suburban Maryvale, but for the next few years she devoted most of her time to rearing the three sons who were born between 1957 and 1962. She also served as a bankruptcy trustee, wrote bar exam questions, set up a lawyer referral service, served on a county zoning appeal board and a governor's committee on marriage and the family, did volunteer work with several civic and charitable organizations, and took an active role in local Republican politics.

In 1965 O'Connor returned to full-time employment as one of Arizona's assistant attorneys general. She remained active in civic affairs, and when the state senator from her district resigned in 1969 Governor Jack Williams appointed her to the seat. She won election to it in 1970 and was easily reelected in 1972. As a state senator O'Connor compiled a moderate to conservative voting record and sufficiently impressed her Republican colleagues that in 1972 they chose her as their majority leader, making her the first woman anywhere in the country to hold that position.

In 1974 O'Connor left the legislature, running successfully for a judgeship in the Maricopa County Superior Court. Although remaining active in Republican politics, she resisted when party leaders tried to persuade her to challenge Democratic Governor Bruce Babbitt in 1978. The following year Babbitt appointed her to the Arizona Court of Appeals. When Reagan selected her for the Supreme Court she became the first appointee in 24 years with prior service on a state court and the first in 32 years with legislative experience.

Supreme Court Justice

It was largely because she was the first woman ever nominated that she was quickly and unanimously confirmed by the Senate. As a justice, her upbringing was expected to keep her solidly conservative and push her into the states-rights camp in court decisions. But her inability to get a job after graduating from law school because she was a woman influenced her as well, and was a point of contention for right-wing conservatives who objected to her appointment for fear she would not oppose abortion.

There was a certain irony in this, for O'Connor was not part of the organized women's movement. After giving early support to the Equal Rights Amendment, she had backed away from it when the opposition of Arizona's two Republican senators became clear. Although the Moral Majority complained that O'Connor was a proponent of abortion, she had cast votes against as well as for it in the legislature. As a justice she aligned herself with its opponents.

Although not a militant feminist, O'Connor was a founder of both the Arizona Women Lawyers Association and the National Association of Women Judges and had fought to eliminate provisions discriminating against women from her state's bar rules and community property laws. On the Court she quickly established a reputation as a judicial opponent of sex discrimination. Her most famous early opinion was Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan (1982), in which the Court held it was unconstitutional for a state nursing school to refuse to admit men.

On other issues Justice O'Connor generally aligned herself with the Court's two most conservative members, Chief Justice Warren Burger and Associate Justice Rehnquist. Exhibiting a strong commitment to law and order, she consistently voted against criminal defendants. However, her response to First Amendment claims were lukewarm at best. As her background on the state bench and an article she had written at about the time of her appointment suggested, she opposed further extensions of federal court jurisdiction. Although part of a conservative bloc on most issues, she did break with it occasionally, as on freedom of information matters. Despite his own far more liberal voting record, Justice Harry Blackman quickly concluded O'Connor was a "fine justice, able and articulate."

Second Decade on the Court

During her years following her appointment by Reagan in 1981, O'Connor followed a pattern that has sometimes confounded presidents attempting to solidify political leanings in the Supreme Court. By 1990, following her first decade on the court she, along with fellow Justice Anthony Kennedy, had become an unpredictable swing vote, her opinions courted by both sides in many decisions.

As the 1990s unfolded, O'Connor was influential or determined the direction of a number of key freedom rulings by the Supreme Court. They included an interpretation of Freedom of Speech, censorship, a ruling governing the Internet and cases dealing with freedom of religion where she was instrumental in striking down a state-mandated moment of silence in public schools.

She influenced the court's direction in cases involving discrimination and harassment because of gender, strengthening women's job opportunity rights. However, she was the swing vote in a decision that narrowed the scope of affirmative action in Adarand v. Pena. And, in 1995, she sided with conservative justices in cases, particularly Miller v. Johnson, that weakened the Voting Rights Act's congressional district apportionment designed to favor minority representation.

She voted with the majority to strike down the core of the federal Brady Act anti-gun legislation requiring background checks of prospective gun purchasers.

In a 1992 challenge to abortion rights, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, O'Connor was one of the majority who voted to uphold the provisions of Roe v. Wade that made abortion legal for women. In 1997, she ruled against another privacy issue: A terminally ill patient's right to die through physician-assisted suicide.

In a U.S. News & World Report story, "The Geography of Justice: Big Decisions by the Supreme Court Turn on the Regional Backgrounds of the Justices," (July, 1997), a former law clerk hinted at the basis for many of O'Connor's decisions. According to the clerk, the justice showed a "great admiration for individual initiative and people taking responsibility for their own actions…." That tendency to discount a need for special protections was called the basis of her voting against every race-based affirmative action issue that came before her.

Throughout many issues before the court, O'Connor stayed true to her roots, joining her fellow conservatives in 123 of 137 decisions by 1997. Although her decisions have not always been popular with feminists, she has served as an excellent role model to women in general. The justice herself became a news item in 1997 when a suspicious-looking package found on her doorstep was suspected of being a bomb. An investigation showed it only contained a pair of tennis shoes the justice had ordered.

Further Reading

Although there was a book-length biography of O'Connor designed for children, adults must look to periodicals for material. Robert E. Riggs, "Justice O'Connor: A First Term Appraisal," Brigham Young University Law Review 1983 (1983), provided an excellent analysis of her early performance on the Supreme Court. Vera Glaser, "She's a Lady," The Washingtonian 19 (May 1984), was informative on the personal side of O'Connor's life, and Beverly B. Cook, "Women as Supreme Court Candidates: From Florence Allen to Sandra Day O'Connor," Judicature 65 (December 1981-January 1982), provided a useful comparative perspective. Sandra Day O'Connor, "Trends in the Relationship Between the Federal and State Courts from the Perspective of a State Judge," William and Mary Law Review 22 (Summer 1981), provided limited insights into Justice O'Connor's own thinking. Related articles on Justice O'Connor can be found in U.S. News & World Report, July 7, 1997; Working Woman, November/ December 1996; Time, June 17, 1996; and People, March 7, 1994.

• Born: Mar. 26, 1930, El Paso, Tex.
• Education: Stanford College, B.A., 1950; Stanford University Law School, LLB., 1952
• Previous government service: assistant attorney general, Arizona, 1965–69; Arizona Senate, 1969–75, majority leader of the Arizona Senate, 1973–74; judge, Maricopa County Superior Court, Arizona, 1975–79; judge, Arizona Court of Appeals, 1979–81
• Appointed by President Ronald Reagan Aug. 19, 1981; replaced Potter Stewart, who retired
• Supreme Court term: confirmed by the Senate Sept. 21, 1981, by a 99–0 vote

Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman to be appointed and confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. She was a brilliant student, and her record at Stanford University Law School was outstanding. However, she had difficulty, at first, in pursuing a career in the law because of her gender. She was an outstanding woman in a profession traditionally dominated by men. Many male lawyers did not want to work with women, and O'Connor had a hard time getting a job she wanted. One prominent law firm offered her a job as a secretary.

Through persistence and competence, O'Connor earned recognition as a lawyer, as a state senator in Arizona, and as a judge in the Arizona state court system. She also found time to raise three sons with her husband, John O'Connor.

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice O'Connor has appeared to resist overturning Roe v. Wade (1973), which granted women the right to have an abortion, although she has tended to narrow the scope of that decision by upholding state-level regulations “not unduly burdensome” to the woman. She has also shaped Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action and separation of church and state with regard to state government actions. She appears to favor strict neutrality over strict separation in the state's treatment of religion. And in response to state-level affirmative action cases, she has tended to favor a strict scrutiny test that would permit programs to rectify prior discrimination by the state government.

Justice O'Connor wrote the Court's first opinion to restrict the use of race as a category in determining the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts (Shaw v. Reno, 1998). She has, however, expressed opposition to the complete removal of the consideration of race in redistricting cases, as long as it is not the primary factor in drawing boundaries of election districts (Bush v. Vera, 1996).

Sources

• Beverly B. Cook, “Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: “Transition to a Republican Court Agenda”,” in The Burger Court: Political and Judicial Profiles, edited by Charles M. Lamb and Stephen C. Halpern (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
• Beverly Gherman, Sandra Day O'Connor: Justice for All (New York: Viking, 1991).
• Peter Huber, Sandra Day O'Connor (New York: Chelsea House, 1990).
• Nancy Maveety, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: Strategist on the Supreme Court (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996)

(1930- ), associate justice, U.S. Supreme Court. O'Connor was born in El Paso and completed both her undergraduate and law degrees at Stanford University. Before her appointment to the Supreme Court, she practiced law and served in the Arizona state senate (1969-1974) and on the Arizona bench (1974-1981). President Ronald Reagan nominated her as the first female justice of the United States in 1981, to replace retiring justice Potter Stewart.

O'Connor began her tenure on the Court as a conservative, voting with Justice William Rehnquist more than 90 percent of the time. But in her first decade on the federal bench, she proved herself an independent thinker. By 1990, she had become the pivotal center vote on a Court made up during those years of four liberals and four conservatives.

Her central role is best illustrated by cases involving the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Her view of that clause, which prohibits any law "respecting an establishment of religion," is that it prohibits any government action that is intended to send, or actually sends, a message endorsing religion. On the basis of this idiosyncratic test, she voted to uphold a public Christmas display including a crèche, but to strike down a public Christmas display of a crèche alone. In each case, her vote determined the outcome. She also provided the crucial fifth vote to strike down a state-mandated moment of silence at the beginning of the public school day.

Another example of her role as the center of the Court is affirmative action. Not only did she often cast the determining vote on the legality of a particular affirmative action program; she also fashioned the constitutional test that gained majority support in 1989. For fifteen years the Court was unable to produce a majority opinion in any constitutional case involving affirmative action. In 1989, in a case involving a "set-aside" program for minority businesses adopted by the city of Richmond, Virginia, Justice O'Connor wrote an opinion accepted almost in its entirety by a majority of the Court. Her opinion trod a middle course, validating affirmative action programs designed to combat prior governmental discrimination, but invalidating those designed to combat merely prior discrimination by the society at large.

O'Connor also provided the determinative vote in a series of cases on the still-developing question of the execution of juvenile or mentally retarded offenders. She voted twice to uphold such convictions and twice to strike them down. In each case her vote was the determinative one, and in each she wrote a separate concurrence to stress that her resolution of the case depended on the particular facts, not on any per se rule, again treading a middle course.

The Court's gender discrimination decisions have also been influenced by O'Connor. Since her appointment, the Court has declared both sexual harassment and sexual stereotyping to be forms of illegal gender discrimination and has upheld various state and local efforts to increase women's opportunities to participate in the labor force. O'Connor has always voted with the majority in these cases, often providing the necessary fifth vote. On one of the most important constitutional issues for women, O'Connor has generally voted to uphold restrictions on abortion, but she has simultaneously provided a moderating influence by refusing to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Thus O'Connor's propensity to make independent and politically moderate judgments gave her significant influence during her first decade on an increasingly polarized Court. As the Court moves further to the right, it remains to be seen whether she can continue to provide a moderating influence or will find herself more often in dissent.

Bibliography:

Richard M. Cordray and James I. Vradelis, "The Emerging Jurisprudence of Justice O'Connor," University of Chicago Law Review 52 (1985): 389; Barbara C. S. Shea, "Sandra Day O'Connor--Woman, Lawyer, Justice: Her First Four Terms on the Supreme Court," University of Missouri at Kansas City Law Review 55 (1986): 1; Suzanna Sherry, "Civic Virtue and the Feminine Voice in Constitutional Adjudication," Virginia Law Review 72 (1986): 543.

Author:

Suzanna Sherry

See also Supreme Court.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman to be sworn into the US Supreme Court, 25 years ago today. Having served as an attorney in Arizona, O'Connor became assistant attorney general and was then elected to the State Senate where she became the first woman in the US to be elected senate majority leader (1972). O'Connor was appointed to the Supreme Court by Pres. Ronald Reagan. A centrist on the court, O'Connor often made the deciding vote on issues like affirmative action, First Amendment clauses and gender discrimination issues. In July 2005, she announced her retirement.

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From our Archives: Today's Highlights, September 25, 2006

O'Connor, Sandra Day, 1930-, U.S. lawyer and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1981-2006), b. El Paso, Tex. Graduating from Stanford law school (1952), she returned to practice in her home state of Arizona. There she was a state assistant attorney general (1965-69) and a Republican state senator (1969-74). Appointed a state judge in 1974, she was in 1979 named to the Arizona Court of Appeals. In 1981, President Reagan nominated her to the U.S. Supreme Court, where she became the first woman justice. Except in cases of sexual discrimination and states' powers under the federal system, she generally resisted judicial activism, emerging in the 1990s as a frequent swing vote between more and less conservative blocs. After leaving the Court, she served (2006) as a member of the Iraq Study Group.

Bibliography

See her Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest (with her brother, H. A. Day; 2001) and The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice (2003); study by J. Biskupic (2005).

The first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, she was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981, becoming the first female justice. O'Connor has established herself as a moderate conservative who prefers narrow, limited holdings.

Sandra Day was born on March 26, 1930, in El Paso, Texas. She grew up in a remote part of southeastern Arizona where her parents had a 160,000-acre ranch. She spent her winters in El Paso, where she lived with her grandmother while attending school. In 1950 she graduated from Stanford University with a major in economics. She then attended Stanford Law School, where she graduated third in her class in 1952. William H. Rehnquist, who would later become her colleague on the U.S. Supreme Court, ranked first in the same law school class.

After law school she married John O'Connor, an attorney. She hoped to join a law firm in Los Angeles or San Francisco, but none was willing to hire a woman attorney, although one did offer her a position as legal secretary. Instead O'Connor spent a year as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California. In 1953 she accompanied her husband, a member of the U.S. Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps, to West Germany. During the three years the couple spent in Germany, O'Connor worked as a civilian attorney for the Quartermaster Corps.

On their return from Germany in 1957, O'Connor and her husband settled in Phoenix, where she entered private practice. She soon became active in state and local government, serving as a member of the Maricopa County Board of Adjustments and Appeals (1960-1963) and the Governor's Committee on Marriage and the Family (1965). From 1965 to 1969 she served as assistant attorney general for Arizona.

In 1969 O'Connor was appointed to fill a vacancy in the Arizona Senate. She won election to a full term in 1970 and was reelected in 1972. After her reelection her colleagues elected her majority leader, making her the first woman in the country to hold such a position.

During her years in the Arizona Senate, O'Connor voted in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and supported the restoration of the death penalty and limitations on government spending. She also played an active role in Republican Party politics, serving as state cochair of the committee supporting the reelection of President Richard M. Nixon in 1972.

O'Connor's career shifted in 1974 with her election to the Maricopa County Superior Court. She became a respected trial judge and was appointed by Democratic Governor Bruce Babbitt to the Arizona Court of Appeals in 1979. In 1981 President Ronald Reagan appointed her to the U.S. Supreme Court, replacing Justice Potter Stewart.

Her decisions on the Court have revealed her to be a pragmatic conservative. She has written many concurring opinions that attempt to limit the majority's holding, suggesting ways that the Court could have decided an issue on narrower grounds. She has joined her conservative brethren in limiting the rights of defendants in criminal procedure cases and restricting federal intervention into areas reserved to the states. She has been an influential voice in reviewing challenges to affirmative action programs. In her majority opinion in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 109 S. Ct. 706, 102 L. Ed. 2d 854 (1989), O'Connor struck down a set-aside program for minority contractors. She concluded that these types of affirmative action programs can only be justified to remedy prior government discrimination instead of past societal discrimination.

Her position on abortion has been consistent. O'Connor has refused to join some of her conservative colleagues in overruling Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 93 S. Ct. 705, 35 L. Ed. 2d 147, the 1973 decision that defined the right to choose abortion as a fundamental constitutional right. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 112 S. Ct. 2791, 120 L. Ed. 2d 674 (1992), she joined Justices Anthony McLeod Kennedy and David H. Souter in an opinion that defended the reasoning of Roe and the line of cases that followed it. She has supported the rights of states to regulate abortion as long as the regulations are not too burdensome.

Quotes:

"The family unit plays a critical role in our society and in the training of the generation to come."

(b.1930), first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Sandra Day grew up on a ranch in Arizona, with the nearest town twenty-five miles away. After attending Stanford University for her college education, she was accepted into the law school there. In 1952, she finished her law degree in two years instead of the usual three, ranking third in her class, and married John O’Connor . She applied for a full-time job as an attorney with several law firms in California, but only one offered her a position—as a legal secretary. Finding that no private firms would hire her as a lawyer, she found a job as a deputy county attorney. After moving to Phoenix, Arizona, she started her own law firm, became involved in local politics, raised three children, and eventually returned to the public sector. In 1969, she was appointed to a state senate seat that had been vacated. She successfully ran for election for two more terms and became the majority leader, making her the first woman to hold this position in any state legislature.

In 1979, O'Connor was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals. Two years later, she was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and confirmed by a unanimous vote in the Senate. During her first term on the Court, she wrote the majority opinion in Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, ruling that the exclusion of men from a nursing program perpetuated stereotypes about women's roles. Some of her best-known cases are in the area of abortion rights. In the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court had struck down a Texas law that banned abortion except to save the life of the mother, establishing the trimester system that balanced the privacy rights of the mother with the state's interest in protecting potential life. Justice O'Connor, however, rejected the trimester system and developed a different approach, the undue burden test, which was eventually adopted by the Supreme Court in Stenberg v. Carhart in 2000.

During her tenure on the Court, journalists, academics, and attorneys often referred to Justice O'Connor as one of the most powerful women in America because of her ability to influence the Court, particularly in the most controversial and high-profile cases. When she was first appointed, many expected her to align with the most conservative wing of the Court. Justice O'Connor, however, while often voting with the conservatives, developed her own style of resolving cases that was more pragmatic than ideological. She became one of the moderates on the Court, and as a result, was often the swing vote. She wrote a disproportionately high number of the Court's opinions in cases decided by one vote. Justice O'Connor announced her resignation in the summer of 2005 at the age of 75 but continued to serve on the bench until her successor, Samuel Alito , was confirmed on 30 January 2006.

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