Sandra Day O'Connor

Early life and education

Sandra Day was born on March 26, 1930, in El Paso, Texas, the daughter of Harry Alfred Day, a rancher, and Ada Mae (Wilkey). She grew up on a 198,000-acre family cattle ranch near Duncan, Arizona and in El Paso, where she attended school. Her home was nine miles from the nearest paved road. It lacked running water or electricity until Sandra was seven years old. As a cowgirl she owned a .22-caliber rifle and would shoot coyotes and jackrabbits. She began driving as soon as she could see over the dashboard and had to learn to change flat tires herself. Sandra had two younger siblings, a sister and a brother, respectively eight and ten years her junior. Her sister Ann Day was a member of the Arizona Legislature from 1990 to 2000. Her brother was H. Alan Day, a lifelong rancher, with whom she wrote Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest (2002), about their childhood experiences on the ranch. For most of her early schooling, Day lived in El Paso with her maternal grandmother. She went to the Radford School for Girls, a private school, because the family ranch was far from schools. Day was able to return to the ranch for holidays and the summer. Day did spend her eighth-grade year living at the ranch and riding a bus 32 miles to school. She graduated sixth in her class at Austin High School in El Paso in 1946.

Accepted into Stanford University at age 16, O'Connor earned a B.A. in economics in 1950, graduating magna cum laude. Inspired by Professor Harry Rathbun, she pursued a law degree at Stanford Law School, graduating near the top of her class in 1952. While attending, she served on the Stanford Law Review whose then presiding editor-in-chief was future Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist. Day achieved the Order of the Coif, indicating she was in the top 10 percent of her class.

Early career and marriage

While in her final year at Stanford Law School, Day began dating John Jay O'Connor III, who was one class year behind her. On December 20, 1952, six months after her graduation, O'Connor and Day married at her family's ranch.

Upon graduation from law school in 1952, O'Connor had difficulty finding a paying job as an attorney in a law firm because of her gender. O'Connor found employment as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California, after she offered to work for no salary and without an office, sharing space with a secretary. After a few months, she began drawing a small salary as she performed legal research and wrote memos. She worked with San Mateo County District Attorney Louis Dematteis and deputy district attorney Keith Sorensen.

When her husband was drafted, O'Connor decided to go with him to work in Germany as a civilian attorney for the Army's Quartermaster Corps. They remained there for three years before returning to the States where they settled in Maricopa County, Arizona, and she started a law firm. They had three sons: Scott (born 1958), Brian (born 1960), and Jay (born 1962). Following Brian's birth, O'Connor took a five-year hiatus from the practice of law.

She volunteered in various political organizations, such as the Maricopa County Young Republicans, and served on Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign in 1964.

O'Connor served as assistant Attorney General of Arizona from 1965 to 1969. In 1969, the governor of Arizona appointed O'Connor to fill a vacancy in the Arizona Senate. She ran for and won the election for the seat the following year. By 1973, she became the first woman to serve as Arizona's or any state's majority leader. She developed a reputation as a skilled negotiator and a moderate. After serving two full terms, O'Connor decided to leave the Senate.

In 1974, O'Connor was appointed to the Maricopa County Superior Court, serving from 1975 to 1979 when she was elevated to the Arizona Court of Appeals.

In late 1977 and early 1978, she presided over an aggravated assault case against Clarence Dixon, a 22-year-old Arizona State University student who had attacked a 15-year-old girl with a metal pipe. O'Connor would find Dixon not guilty by reason of insanity and have him remanded to a state hospital. In the four-day period between O'Connor's ruling and Dixon's remanding to hospital, Dixon would rape and murder one of his seniors, 21-year-old Deana Lynne Bowdoin; he would not be arrested until 2001 when DNA evidence identified him, and he was executed for Bowdoin's murder in 2022.

Supreme Court career

Nomination and confirmation

On July 7, 1981, Reagan – who had pledged during his 1980 presidential campaign to appoint the first woman to the Court – announced he would nominate O'Connor as an associate justice of the Supreme Court to replace the retiring Potter Stewart. O'Connor received notification from President Reagan of her nomination on the day prior to the announcement and did not know that she was a finalist for the position.

Reagan wrote in his diary on July 6, 1981: "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." O'Connor told Reagan she did not remember whether she had supported repealing Arizona's law banning abortion. However, she had cast a preliminary vote in the Arizona State Senate in 1970 in favor of a bill to repeal the state's criminal-abortion statute. In 1974, O'Connor had opined against a measure to prohibit abortions in some Arizona hospitals. Anti-abortion and religious groups opposed O'Connor's nomination because they suspected, correctly, she would not be willing to overturn Roe v. Wade. U.S. Senate Republicans, including Don Nickles of Oklahoma, Steve Symms of Idaho, and Jesse Helms of North Carolina called the White House to express their discontent over the nomination; Nickles said he and "other profamily Republican senators would not support O'Connor". Helms, Nickles, and Symms nevertheless reluctantly voted for confirmation.

Reagan formally nominated O'Connor on August 19, 1981. Conservative activists such as the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Howard Phillips, and Peter Gemma also spoke out against the nomination. Gemma called the nomination "a direct contradiction of the Republican platform to everything that candidate Reagan said and even President Reagan has said in regard to social issues." Gemma, the executive director of the National Pro-Life Political Action Committee, had sought to delay O'Connor's confirmation by challenging her record, including support for the Equal Rights Amendment.

O'Connor's confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee began on September 9, 1981. It was the first televised confirmation hearing for a Supreme Court justice. The confirmation hearing lasted three days and largely focused on the issue of abortion. When asked, O'Connor refused to telegraph her views on abortion, and she was careful not to leave the impression that she supported abortion rights. The Judiciary Committee approved O'Connor with seventeen votes in favor and one vote of present.

Tenure

O'Connor said she felt a responsibility to demonstrate women could do the job of justice. She faced some practical concerns, including the lack of a women's restroom near the Courtroom.

Two years after O'Connor joined the Court, The New York Times published an editorial that mentioned the "nine men" of the "SCOTUS", or Supreme Court of the United States. O'Connor responded with a letter to the editor reminding the Times that the Court was no longer composed of nine men and referred to herself as FWOTSC (First Woman on the Supreme Court). On January 20, 1989, at the Inauguration of George H. W. Bush, O'Connor became the first female justice of the Supreme Court to administer the oath for a Vice President of the United States (Dan Quayle).

O'Connor was a proponent of collegiality among justices on the court, often insisting that the justices eat lunch together.

In 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the second female Supreme Court justice. O'Connor said that she felt relief from the media clamor when she no longer was the only woman on the Court. In May 2010, O'Connor warned female Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan about the "unpleasant" process of confirmation hearings.

Supreme Court jurisprudence

Initially, O'Connor's voting record aligned closely with the conservative William Rehnquist (voting with him 87% of the time during her first three years at the Court). From that time until 1998, O'Connor's alignment with Rehnquist ranged from 93.4% to 63.2%, hitting above 90% in three of those years. In nine of her first 16 years on the Court, O'Connor voted with Rehnquist more than with any other justice.

Later on, as the Court's make-up became more conservative (e.g., Anthony Kennedy replacing Lewis Powell, and Clarence Thomas replacing Thurgood Marshall), O'Connor often became the swing vote on the Court. However, she usually disappointed the Court's more liberal bloc in contentious 5–4 decisions: from 1994 to 2004, she joined the traditional conservative bloc of Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Thomas 82 times; she joined the liberal bloc of John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer only 28 times.

O'Connor's relatively small shift away from conservatives on the Court seems to have been due at least in part to Thomas' views. When Thomas and O'Connor were voting on the same side, she would typically write a separate opinion of her own, refusing to join his. In the 1992 term, O'Connor did not join a single one of Thomas's dissents.

Some notable cases in which O'Connor joined the majority in a 5–4 decision were:

McConnell v. FEC, 540 U.S. 93 (2003), upholding the constitutionality of most of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bill regulating "soft money" contributions.

Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003), O'Connor wrote the opinion of the Court in Grutter and joined the majority in Gratz. In this pair of cases, the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions program was held to have engaged in unconstitutional reverse discrimination, but the more limited type of affirmative action in the University of Michigan Law School's admissions program was held to have been constitutional.

Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63 (2003): O'Connor wrote the majority opinion, with the four conservative justices concurring, that a 50-year to life sentence without parole for petty shoplifting a few children's videotapes under California's three strikes law was not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment because there was no "clearly established" law to that effect. Leandro Andrade, a Latino nine-year Army veteran and father of three, will be eligible for parole in 2046 at age 87.

Other activities while serving on the Court

In 2003, she wrote a book titled The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice (ISBN 0-375-50925-9). In 2005, she wrote a children's book, Chico: A True Story from the Childhood of the First Woman Supreme Court Justice, named for her favorite horse, which offered an autobiographical depiction of her childhood.

Retirement

On December 12, 2000, The Wall Street Journal reported that O'Connor was reluctant to retire with a Democrat in the presidency: "At an Election Night party at the Washington, D.C., home of Mary Ann Stoessel, widow of former Ambassador Walter Stoessel, the justice's husband, John O'Connor, mentioned to others her desire to step down, according to three witnesses. But Mr. O'Connor said his wife would be reluctant to retire if a Democrat were in the White House and would choose her replacement. Justice O'Connor declined to comment."

By 2005, the composition of the Court had been unchanged for eleven years, the second-longest period in American history without any such change. Rehnquist was widely expected to be the first justice to retire during Bush's term, owing to his age and his battle with cancer, although rumors of O'Connor's possible retirement circulated as well.

On July 1, 2005, O'Connor announced her intention to retire. In her letter to Bush, she stated that her retirement from active service would take effect upon the confirmation of her successor. Her letter did not provide a reason for her departure; however, a Supreme Court spokeswoman confirmed O'Connor was leaving to spend time with her husband.

On July 19, Bush nominated D.C. Circuit Judge John Roberts to succeed O'Connor. O'Connor heard the news over the car radio on the way back from a fishing trip. She described Roberts soon after the nomination as "good in every way, except he's not a woman".

O'Connor had expected to leave the Court before the next term started on October 3, 2005. However, Rehnquist died on September 3, creating an immediate vacancy on the Court. Two days later, Bush withdrew Roberts as his nominee for her seat and instead appointed him to fill the vacant office of Chief Justice. O'Connor agreed to stay on the Court until her replacement was named and confirmed. She spoke at the late chief justice's funeral. On October 3, Bush nominated White House Counsel Harriet Miers to replace O'Connor. After much criticism and controversy over her nomination, on October 27, Miers asked Bush to withdraw her nomination. Bush accepted, reopening the search for O'Connor's successor.

The continued delays in confirming a successor further extended O'Connor's time on the Court. She continued to hear oral argument on cases, including cases dealing with controversial issues such as physician-assisted suicide and abortion. O'Connor's last Court opinion, Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of New England, written for a unanimous court, was a procedural decision that involved a challenge to a New Hampshire abortion law.

Post-Supreme Court career

In her retirement, O'Connor continued to speak and organize conferences on the issue of judicial independence. During a March 2006 speech at Georgetown University, O'Connor said some political attacks on the independence of the courts pose a direct threat to the constitutional freedoms of Americans. She said, "Any reform of the system is debatable as long as it is not motivated by retaliation for decisions that political leaders disagree with." She also noting that she was "against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning". "Courts interpret the law as it was written, not as the congressmen might have wished it was written", and "it takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

On November 19, 2008, O'Connor published an introductory essay on a themed judicial accountability issue in the Denver University Law Review. She called for a better public understanding of judicial accountability. On November 7, 2007, at a conference on her landmark opinion in Strickland v. Washington (1984) sponsored by the Constitution Project, O'Connor highlighted the lack of proper legal representation for many of the poorest defendants. O'Connor also urged the creation of a system for "merit selection for judges", a cause for which she had frequently advocated.

On August 7, 2008, O'Connor and Abdurrahman Wahid, former President of Indonesia, wrote an editorial in the Financial Times stating concerns about the threatened imprisonment of Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim.

In October 2008, O'Connor spoke on racial equality in education at a conference hosted by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. Later in the conference, she was awarded the Charles Hamilton Houston Justice Award alongside Desmond Tutu and Dolores Huerta.

Following the Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision on corporate political spending, O'Connor offered measured criticism of the decision, telling Georgetown law students and lawyers, "that the Court has created an unwelcome new path for wealthy interests to exert influence on judicial elections."

Activities and memberships

As a retired Supreme Court justice, O'Connor continued to receive a full salary, maintained a staffed office with at least one law clerk, and heard cases on a part-time basis in federal district courts and courts of appeals as a visiting judge. By 2008, O'Connor had sat for cases with the 2nd, 8th, and 9th Circuits. O'Connor heard an Arizona voting rights case which the Supreme Court later reviewed. In Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, a 7–2 majority affirmed O'Connor and the rest of 9th Circuit panel, and struck down a provision of Arizona's voting registration law. O'Connor hired a law clerk for the October 2015 term, but did not hire a law clerk for the subsequent term.

O'Connor was elected as an honorary fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration in 2005. In October that year, O'Connor accepted the largely ceremonial role of becoming the 23rd Chancellor of the College of William & Mary. O'Connor continued in the role until 2012. O'Connor was a member of the 2006 Iraq Study Group, appointed by the U.S. Congress. From 2006, she was a trustee on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation. O'Connor chaired the Jamestown 2007 celebration, commemorating the 400th anniversary of the founding of the colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. The Sandra Day O'Connor Project on the State of the Judiciary, named for O'Connor, held annual conferences from 2006 through 2008 on the independence of the judiciary. O'Connor was a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2006, O'Connor taught a course on the Supreme Court at the University of Arizona's James E. Rogers College of Law as a distinguished jurist in residence. On April 5, 2006, Arizona State University named its law school the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law in her honor.

O'Connor wrote the 2013 book Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court.

On May 15, 2006, O'Connor gave the commencement address at the William & Mary School of Law, where she said that judicial independence is "under serious attack at both the state and national level". In 2008, O'Connor was named an inaugural Harry Rathbun Visiting Fellow by the Office for Religious Life at Stanford University. On April 22, 2008, she gave "Harry's Last Lecture on a Meaningful Life" in honor of the former Stanford Law professor who shaped her undergraduate and law careers. On September 17, 2014, O'Connor appeared on the television show Jeopardy! and provided a couple of video answers to the category 'Supreme Court' which appeared on the show. On the same day in Concord, New Hampshire, she gave a talk alongside her former colleague Justice David Souter about the importance of meaningful civics education in the United States.

Personal life, illness and death

Upon her appointment to the Supreme Court, O'Connor and her husband moved to the Kalorama area of Washington, D.C. The O'Connors became active in the Washington, D.C. social scene. O'Connor played tennis and golf in her spare time. She was a baptized member of the Episcopal Church.

O'Connor was successfully treated for breast cancer in 1988, and she also had her appendix removed that year. That same year, John O'Connor left the Washington, D.C., law firm of Miller & Chevalier for a practice that required him to split his time between Washington, D.C. and Phoenix.

Her husband suffered from Alzheimer's disease for nearly 20 years, until his death in 2009, and she became involved in raising awareness of the disease. After retiring from the Court, O'Connor moved back to Phoenix, Arizona.

Around 2013, O'Connor's friends and colleagues noticed that she was becoming more forgetful and less talkative. By 2017, back problems led to her needing to use a wheelchair, and to her moving to an assisted living facility. In October 2018, O'Connor announced her effective retirement from public life after disclosing that she had been diagnosed with the early stages of dementia.

On May 7, 2016, her younger sister, Ann Day, was killed in a car accident in Tucson, Arizona, as a result of a collision with a drunk driver.

On December 1, 2023, O'Connor died in Phoenix, at the age of 93, due to complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness. After her death, Chief Justice John Roberts called her "an eloquent advocate for civil education" and a "fiercely independent defender of the rule of law" in a public statement. President Joe Biden said she was an "American icon", dedicated to public service and the "bedrock American principle of an independent judiciary". iCivics board chairman Larry Kramer said that O'Connor was "kind and generous" and relayed that iCivics was her "brainchild".

O'Connor lay in repose in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court on December 18, 2023. She was memorialized the following day in a funeral service held at the Washington National Cathedral.

Legacy and awards

O'Connor was particularly remembered for being the first woman on the Court, and for functioning as the swing vote in the 5–4 decision in Bush v. Gore, which handed the presidency to George W. Bush.

Overall, she began her tenure on the court as a Reaganite but would later attempt to steer the court toward decisions that better aligned with public opinion. Some argue that O'Connor's jurisprudential legacy was largely undone by the appointment of Samuel Alito as her successor.

In March 2019, historian and journalist Evan Thomas published a biography detailing O'Connor's life, pulling from interviews and her archives, and becoming a New York Times Bestseller and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.