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Sandra Day O’Connor

1981-

SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, was born March 26,1930, to Harry A. Day and Ada Mae Wilkey Day in El Paso, Texas. She grew up on the Lazy B Ranch, 198,000 acres of land with more than 2,000 cattle, twenty-five miles from the town of Duncan in southeastern Arizona. Her grandfather, Henry Clay Day, had founded the ranch in the early 1880s, some thirty years before Arizona gained statehood. The ranch house, a simple, four-room adobe building, had neither running water nor electricity until Sandra Day was seven. In the drought years of the Great Depression, her family confronted real hardship, but the ranch eventually prospered.

Day's sister and brother, Ann and Alan, were born in 1938 and 1939; she therefore spent her first eight years as an only child, and most of these years on a remote ranch. Her early childhood friends were her parents, ranch hands, a bobcat, and a few javelina hogs. She learned to entertain herself and to find diversion in books. Her mother spent hours reading to her from the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, and the Saturday Evening Post. By the age of eight, she was also mending fences, riding with the cowboys, firing her own .22 rifle, and driving a truck.

At age five, Sandra Day began to spend the school months with her maternal grandmother, Mamie Wilkey, in El Paso in order to attend Radford School, a private establishment for girls. She spent each summer at the ranch. Day lived with her grandmother from kindergarten through high school, with a one-year interruption at age thirteen, when homesickness impelled her to return to Arizona. During her years in El Paso, she was deeply influenced by her grandmother's strong will and high expectations.

Day graduated from high school at sixteen and entered Stanford University. She earned a degree in economics magna cum laude in 1950. In her senior year she began to study law and then continued at Stanford Law School. There she served on the Stanford Law Review and won membership in the Order of the Coif, a legal honor society. She graduated in 1952, third in her law school class of 102 students. That same year Sandra Day married John Jay O'Connor III, whom she had met while working on the law review.

O'Connor set out to find a job as a lawyer but was repeatedly turned down by firms that would not hire women. The one job offer she received was for a position as a legal secretary. Ironically, almost thirty years later, Attorney General William French Smith, who had been a senior member of the firm that made the offer, would be instrumental in O'Connor's appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead of becoming a secretary, O'Connor accepted a position as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California. She recalls how that job "influenced the balance of my life because it demonstrated how much I did enjoy public service."

John O'Connor graduated a year after his wife and joined the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps, in which he served for three years in Frankfurt, Germany. While overseas, Sandra Day O'Connor worked as a civilian lawyer for the Quartermaster Corps. The couple returned to the United States in 1957 and moved to Maricopa County, Arizona. In the next six years they had three sons, Scott, Brian, and Jay.

In 1958, after the birth of her first child, O'Connor opened her own firm with a partner, Tom Tobin. She stopped working, however, after Brian's birth. From 1960 to 1965, besides being a full-time mother, O'Connor did a variety of volunteer work. She wrote questions for the Arizona bar exam, helped start the state bar's lawyer referral service, sat on the local zoning commission, and served as a member of the Maricopa County Board of Adjustments and Appeals. In 1965 she served as a member of the Governor's Committee on Marriage and Family, worked as an administrative assistant of the Arizona State Hospital and acted as an adviser to the Salvation Army, and volunteered in a school for blacks and Hispanics. During these years, O'Connor also became actively involved in Republican politics. She worked as a county precinct officer for the party from 1960 to 1965, and as district chairman from 1962 to 1965. "Two things were clear to me from the onset," O'Connor has remarked about that period in her life. "One is, I wanted a family and the second was that I wanted to work--and I love to work."

O'Connor returned to regular employment in 1965, as an assistant state attorney general, while also continuing her volunteer work. In 1969, when Isabel A. Burgess resigned from her seat in the Arizona Senate to accept an appointment in Washington, D.C., Gov. Jack Williams appointed O'Connor as her replacement. O'Connor won reelection to the state Senate in two successive terms. She was elected majority leader in 1972, the first woman to hold such office anywhere in the United States. Among her Republican colleagues, her voting record was moderate to conservative, although she differed with some of them on issues such as discrimination and in her support of the Equal Rights Amendment. In addition, she served as co-chair of the state committee to elect Richard Nixon to the presidency.

In 1974 O'Connor won a hard-fought election to a state judgeship on the Maricopa County Superior Court, on which she served for the next five years. Republican leaders encouraged her to run for governor in 1978, but she declined. In 1979 the Democratic governor selected O'Connor as his first appointee to the Arizona Court of Appeals. There, she decided appeals on subjects spanning workmen's compensation, divorce, criminal convictions, torts, and real property. Twenty-one months later, on August 19, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fulfilled a campaign promise to appoint a woman to the U.S. Supreme Court and nominated O'Connor to the seat vacated by Justice Potter Stewart.

In her Senate confirmation hearings, O'Connor expressed cautiously conservative views on capital punishment, the rule excluding illegally obtained evidence from trials, and busing for desegregation, while declining to be pinned down on the question of abortion. When asked how she wanted to be remembered, O'Connor replied: "Ah, the tombstone question. I hope it says, 'Here lies a good judge.'" On September 15, 1981, seventeen of the eighteen members of the Judiciary Committee recommended her approval. One voted "present" because O'Connor had declined to condemn the Supreme Court's 1973 abortion decision, Roe v. Wade. The Senate confirmed her appointment 99-0, and O'Connor took the oath of office September 26, 1981. When she began her first term in October, O'Connor brought to the Court experience from service in all three branches of government and was the only sitting justice who had been elected to public office.

At this point, O'Connor was considered very conservative. Time magazine labeled her Justice William H. Rehnquist's "Arizona twin"; indeed, in her first term the two voted together on twenty-seven of the thirty-one decisions decided by 5-4 votes. In her first five terms, O'Connor was often aligned with the conservative faction of the Court. Nevertheless, in her best-known opinion of her first term, O'Connor was joined by the liberal wing of the Court in a 5-4 ruling that a state-supported university in Mississippi could not constitutionally exclude men from its school of nursing. By the end of the 1984 term, O'Connor had come to be identified as a restrained jurist, a strong supporter of federalism, and a cautious interpreter of the Constitution.

In subsequent terms, O'Connor often voted with the centrist Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and the two were in the majority on 5-4 rulings more often than any other justices. While O'Connor generally sided with her conservative colleagues, she frequently wrote her own, narrower concurrence. "It has become almost commonplace for 5-4 rulings by the Court's conservative bloc to be embroidered--and often limited--by an O'Connor concurrence," one observer commented in 1989. "Even though none of the other justices agree completely with her views, they in effect become the law because of her position near the center of the Court's ideological spectrum." O'Connor came under increasing scrutiny as the swing vote on a Court often sharply divided over issues such as affirmative action, the death penalty, and abortion. "As O'Connor goes, so goes the Court," another observer would declare in 1990. When David Souter joined the Court that fall, O'Connor and he voted the same way in every 5-4 decision during his first term.

Among O'Connor's noted opinions are those dealing with issues of religious freedom. A concurring opinion she wrote in Lynch v. Donnelly (1984) on the constitutionality of a government-sponsored nativity scene has subsequently established the legal standard for determining when such displays violate the Constitution's prohibition on government establishment of religion. A year later, another O'Connor concurrence was important in outlining the constitutional bounds on a state-prescribed "voluntary moment of silence" for school children. According to O'Connor, the challenged law was unconstitutional in that its purpose was to encourage prayer, but might have passed muster had it not favored "the child who chooses to pray ... over the child who chooses to meditate or reflect."

In other opinions, O'Connor has endorsed affirmative action for minorities if "narrowly tailored" to correct a demonstrated wrong, but not otherwise. In a landmark 1989 opinion, City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co., O'Connor's opinion for the Court concluded that government programs setting aside a fixed percentage of public contracts for minority businesses violate equal protection. On the highly charged issue of abortion, O'Connor searched for a middle ground in a series of decisions in the 1980s and ultimately found one in 1992. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, O'Connor and Justice Anthony Kennedy joined a controversial plurality opinion by Justice Souter that criticized the constitutional foundation for--yet declined to overturn--the Court's original 1973 recognition of the right to abortion. Consistent with her own tenures as a state legislator and state judge, O'Connor has favored limiting intrusions by federal courts on state powers, especially in criminal matters. She has taken a similarly restrained view of federal judicial power with respect to the legislative and executive branches.

Legal scholars have had difficulty categorizing O'Connor's jurisprudence. Her opinions are conservative and attentive to detail, but also open-minded; they reflect no profound ideology and rarely contain any sweeping rhetoric. Critics say that her opinions have no passion, no lofty vision, and lack a personal tone. O'Connor has been compared to Justices Powell and John Marshall Harlan, "whose careers were distinguished by a devotion to pragmatic resolution of the issues before them." She is described as a justice "who looks to resolve each case and no more, one with no overarching philosophy that might preordain a result."

O’Connor is a tall, striking woman, with glittering eyes and an unflinching gaze. She speaks with quiet, confident authority. Her former law clerks describe her as very much in control, committed, intense, a perfectionist--but also warm, down-to-earth, and irrepressibly upbeat. Shortly after taking her seat, O'Connor established a morning exercise class in the Court gym for the women employees. Her chambers are noted for long hours and sometimes seven-day work weeks, punctuated with popcorn, Mexican brunches, or mandatory outings to the Smithsonian or to go white-water rafting. In the fall of 1988 O'Connor was diagnosed with breast cancer; the day before her surgery she fulfilled a speaking engagement at Washington and Lee University, and she was back on the bench ten days later, without missing an oral argument.