Sandra Day O'Connor, The First Woman Justice On The US Supreme Court, Dies At 93

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, died Dec. 1 in Phoenix.

O’Connor, who was 93, died due to complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness, according to the court, per a Washington Post report.

O’Connor was a pioneer for women professionals and passed on her legacy of civic engagement and enduring legal interpretations.

Throughout her tenure on the Supreme Court, the conservative justice championed numerous causes and ruled on several landmark cases:


• Gender Equality: One of her first decisions on the court was Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan. She delivered the majority opinion, which ruled that the female-only policy of the university violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 
• Women’s Rights: One of her well-known swing votes defied her Republican party in reaffirming the Roe v. Wade decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992.
• Voting Rights: In Morse v. Republication Party of Virginia, O’Connor joined the majority, which ruled that key anti-discrimination provisions of the Voting Rights Act apply to the political conventions that choose party candidates. 
• Bush v. Gore: The court heard the case on the 2000 Presidential Election vote certification made by Florida’s Secretary of State. The court let it stand for Republican candidate George W. Bush, who won the state’s 25 electoral votes, which gave Bush 271 electoral votes to Democrat Al Gore’s 267 electoral votes. O’Connor concurred with the majority. In retirement, she said that the court should not have taken the case.
• Gay Rights: In Lawrence v. Texas, the court overturned a 1986 ruling against gay sex. In a separate concurring opinion, O’Connor wrote the state’s sodomy laws create unequal treatment under the law. 
• Wrote the majority opinion for Grutter v. Bollinger upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School. “Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our nation is essential if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realized,” she wrote.

O’Connor was on the court from 1981 to 2006 — but her journey there was not without struggle.

Having obtained her law degree at 22, O’Connor was unable to find a job in a law firm in California because none would not hire a woman, an experience not uncommon for women of that era. She became a legal secretary, but persisted in her legal job hunt, ultimately working for free as a San Mateo deputy county attorney. 

Her husband, John Jay O’Connor III, became stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, and there she worked as a civilian attorney with the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps. In 1957, they moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where she was admitted to the bar. O’Connor worked in a private practice, then left after the birth of her second of three children to concentrate on raising them.

In 1965, she returned to work as the assistant attorney general of Arizona. She also played an active role in the Republican Party.

She was appointed in 1969 to a vacant seat in the Arizona State Senate.
O’Connor went on to win two reelections to that seat and served as the first female majority leader in state legislature, where she worked towards changing various laws that discriminated against women: she helped repeal a 1913 Arizona statute prohibiting women from working more than eight hours a day, which had been used to prevent women from seeking and keeping jobs. O’Connor also sponsored legislation giving women equal responsibility in managing property jointly held with their spouses.

An election in 1975 to the Superior Court of Maricopa County followed, and then an appointment to the Arizona Supreme Court of Appeals.

During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan made a commitment to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. President Reagan fulfilled that promise by nominating O’Connor, who replaced Justice Potter Stewart when he retired in 1981.

While personally disdaining the label “swing vote,” O’Connor frequently found herself referred to as such by the press because her pragmatic approach to judging sometimes resulted in her vote being cast among the majority in 5-4 decisions. She authored 676 opinions in her career, 301 of which were the Opinion of the Court, touching on a wide range of issues. 

O’Connor retired from the Supreme Court on January 31, 2006. During her retirement, she served on the Iraq Study Group and was a board member for the American Bar Association’s Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative.

Among her other activities, she served as Chancellor of the College of William and Mary, where she was named an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa in 2008; as a Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, and as a board member of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the National Constitution Center, and the William H. Rehnquist Center.

She founded iCivics, a web-based education project aimed at engaging middle school and high school students in civics, in 2009. In recognition of her lifetime accomplishments, President Barack Obama awarded her the highest civilian honor in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on Aug. 12, 2009.

O’Connor was not without a flair for fun and appeared on “Jeopardy!” in 2014 providing a couple of video answers to the category “Supreme Court” which appeared on the show.

Sandra Day was born on March 26, 1930, in El Paso, Texas. She was the daughter of Harry Alfred Day, a rancher, and Ada Mae Wilkey. She spent her formative years on the Lazy B, a 198,000-acre cattle ranch straddling the southern Arizona and New Mexico border. She had a sister, Ann Day, and brother, H. Alan Day, with whom she wrote, “Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American West” (2002) about their childhood experiences on the ranch, which initially lacked electricity or indoor plumbing until she was seven years old. O’Connor also learned how to ride with the cowboys, brand cattle and fire a .22 caliber rifle at a young age.

At age 6, O’Connor was sent to live with her maternal grandmother in El Paso, Texas, to attend the Radford School for Girls, before moving to Austin High School, also in El Paso, where she graduated sixth in her class in 1946.

At age 16, O’Connor went to Stanford University where she graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts in economics in 1950. She attended Stanford Law School, one of five women in her class, where she served on the Board of Editors of the Stanford Law Review and was a member of the  Order of the Coif, a legal honorary society. She received her bachelor of law (LLB) degree in 1952. 

She met her husband, John Jay O’Connor III, at law school and started dating her senior year; he was a year behind. Six months after she graduated, they were married at her family ranch. They had three sons: Scott (born 1958), Brian (born 1960) and Jay (born 1962).

O'Connor was successfully treated for breast cancer in 1988. O’Connor’s husband, who was an attorney, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease nearly 20 years before he died in 2009. His illness was a significant reason why O’Connor resigned from the Supreme Court. O’Connor, herself, started showing early signs of Alzheimer’s-like dementia in October 2018, when she announced her retirement from public life.

In addition to the book she wrote with her brother, O’Connor wrote “Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court” in 2013. There is a PBS documentary about her, “Sandra Day O’Connor: The First.”

“As women achieve power, the barriers will fall. As society sees what women can do, as women see what women can do, there will be more women out there doing things, and we’ll all be better off for it,” said O’Connor in a speech from 1990.

Taylor Cox contributed to this obituary.

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