Lawyer who became the first woman to sit on the US Supreme Court
For more than a decade from 1981 Sandra Day O’Connor, who has died at the age of 93, had a strong claim to being the most powerful woman in America. Early in his presidency Ronald Reagan had made good on an election promise to appoint the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court and selected the selfconfessed “cowgirl”, who had grown up shooting jackrabbits on a remote ranch in Arizona. “She is truly a person for all seasons, possessing those unique qualities of temperament, fairness, intellectual capacity and devotion to the public good which have characterised the 101 brethren who have preceded her,” he said.
The new president did not demur when anti-abortion groups opposed O’Connor's appointment in 1981 because of what they perceived to be her chequered voting record on the issue as a legislator in Arizona. Others on the American right were suspicious of her qualified support for the equal rights amendment that would invalidate laws that discriminate against women.
They were right to doubt her, as over the next 25 years O’Connor consistently marched to a different drum than the political clamouring of the Republican Party and social conservatives. Though a moderate conservative herself, she was mindful of the public mood and the need for consensus. “Rare indeed is the legal victory – in court or legislature – that is not a careful byproduct of an emerging social consensus,” she wrote in The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice, an anthology of her essays published in 2003.
It was an approach fostered during her years as a legislator in the Arizona state senate, during which she would invite Republicans and Democrats for a homecooked meal to encourage constructive dialogue on issues of seemingly intractable standpoints. And despite freely admitting the political allegiance that had got her appointed to the court in the first place, she claimed to be motivated by the sacred statutes of the US constitution above all else. Indeed, she always kept a copy of it in her handbag, including later amendments that abolished slavery, expanded the right to vote and secured equality on the basis of sex and other criteria.
Perhaps the most profound rulings were her consistent votes in favour of upholding the 1973 ruling of Roe v Wade, which enshrined women’s constitutional right to have an abortion. She upheld the principle despite her personal view and even though she voted in favour of US
states’ power to restrict a woman’s right to later-term abortions when a foetus could be viable outside the womb.
When a later attempt to repeal Roe v Wade was brought to the court in Planned Parenthood v Casey (1992), O’Connor once again defied expectations, along with two other conservative members of the court, and reaffirmed her support for the “core” of the 1973 ruling.
She was saddened when the Supreme Court – bolstered by three justices appointed by President Trump – repealed Roe v Wade last year, thus giving US states the right to ban abortion. The principle of judicial independence for which she had always campaigned so passionately had been undermined in her opinion.
Proof of her readiness to re-examine her preconceptions was her support in votes that enshrined “affirmative action” in government programmes allocating benefits on the basis of race. O’Connor had initially opposed such provisions. “Affirmative action's benefits are not theoretical but real,” she wrote for the 5-to-4 majority ruling on Grutter v Bollinger (2003) that upheld the right of Michigan Law School to run such an admissions policy. “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 realised.”
Notwithstanding her views on Roe v Wade, O’Connor was a strong advocate for the self-determination of state legislatures against the incursion of federal power in a number of rulings in the late 1990s and early 2000s. One of her only regrets, she said, was her support in the 5-4 ruling in Bush v Gore that forbade further recounts in the Florida vote for the US election in 2000, which had tipped the scales in favour of George W Bush’s victory.
Until the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second woman to sit on the Supreme Court in 1993, O’Connor admitted that being the first and only woman justice in its history weighed heavily on her shoulders. “It made me very nervous,” she said. “It's all right to be the first to do something but I didn’t want to be the last woman on the Supreme Court. If I took the job and did a lousy job, it would take a long time to get another one.” With her piercing gaze and ramrodstraight back, she never showed the strain and carried on stoically while being treated for breast cancer in 1988. She and Bader Ginsburg became great friends.
Sandra Day was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1930 to Harry Alfred Day and Ada Mae (nee Wilkey). She grew up on her family’s vast cattle ranch called Lazy B in the Arizona high desert, close to the border with New Mexico. The family home was nine miles from the nearest road and had neither running water nor electricity for the first few years of her life. The child was entrusted with a .22 calibre rifle: coyotes and rabbits were fair game. By the age of 10 she was driving a truck on the ranch and changing flat tyres.
According to her biographer, Evan Thomas, her tough upbringing taught her to stand up for herself in a man’s world. She also followed the example of her mother, who never allowed herself to be treated by her husband – a “real cowboy” – as anything less than an equal. “He could be harsh. And her mom, who was a very elegant lady in this dusty ranch, always wore a dress, learnt how to not be bullied,” Thomas said. She lived with her grandparents while attending Austin High School in El Paso. She enrolled at Stanford University aged 16 and graduated magna cum laude in economics.
She graduated from Stanford Law School, California, in 1952, taking two years to complete the course rather than the standard three, by which point she had also married John Jay O’Connor, a fellow Stanford law student. She had chosen him over Bill Rehnquist, the star pupil in her year, who would later serve as the chief justice of the Supreme Court and who had also proposed marriage.
Despite qualifying third in her year at Stanford Law School, the only job offer she received from a law firm was as a secretary. She turned the offer down and worked as deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California, having offered to work unpaid. Within a few months she was drawing a salary. When her husband was drafted into the US army, she went with him to Frankfurt, Germany, and worked as a civilian attorney with the Army Quartermaster Corps. After three years the couple returned to America and settled in Maricopa County, Arizona, where she would give birth to three sons, Scott, Brian and Jay, who all survive her.
O’Connor focused on bringing up her sons for five years. Having been admitted to the Bar, she started a private practice. She became increasingly involved in the Republican Party in Arizona. In 1965 she began working as assistant state attorney and in 1969 joined the Arizona state senate. She became its Republican leader in 1972, the first female majority leader of a state senate. O’Connor was later appointed as a judge in the Arizona Court of Appeals.
Often interminable hours in court only strengthened her love of the outdoors. She enjoyed tennis, golf, skiing and horseriding and was active in the Episcopal Church. O’Connor stood down from the Supreme Court in 2006 to care for her husband, who was ailing with dementia. He died in 2009.
In retirement she served as a visiting judge on federal appeals courts across the US. She also wrote two children’s books inspired by her childhood in Arizona. President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.
To the end she remained “lively and fun”, according to Thomas, her biographer. “She liked to dance. She liked to tell dirty jokes. She had great human intelligence. She was a great leader partly because she knew how to listen.”
– The Times