Justice’s trailblazing role came naturally
We can surmise with some confidence that Sandra Day O’Connor, who died Friday at age 93, is the only U.S. Supreme Court justice in American history ever to have a brace of pet javelinas as a child. The sturdy, tusked creatures — named Sandra and Ann after the future jurist and her sister — enjoyed hopping into laps and being petted.
O’Connor recalled Sandra and Ann in her bestselling memoir, “Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the Southwest,” written with her brother H. Allen Day and published in 2002. Describing the remote spread straddling the ArizonaNew Mexico border along the Gila River, she not only brought to life for her readers a menagerie of pets she and her siblings kept — including dogs, cats and horses, as well as deer, horned toads, a sparrow hawk, a raccoon, a desert tortoise, a goat or two and a bobcat named Bob — but also provided revealing insights into how her childhood influenced her work as the first woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
It seemed to imbue her with grit, for starters. After graduating near the top of her class at Stanford Law School (third among 102) she was passed over for jobs because she was a woman; the only offer she could score was for a legal secretary. She eventually persuaded a reluctant San Mateo County attorney to hire her, even offering to work for free if he couldn’t fund the deputy position.
She went on to be appointed and reelected as an Arizona state senator, later becoming the first woman of any state to serve as a majority leader. She traded politics for a judgeship on the Arizona Court of Appeals and was nominated to the high court by President Ronald Reagan. She took the oath of office Sept. 25, 1981, and served until her retirement in 2006. Throughout her life, the Lazy B ranch was her touchstone.
From first grade through high school, O’Connor spent the school year with her grandparents in El Paso. “I was always homesick when away from the ranch,” she wrote. “My grandmother was loving and caring, but the ranch was where I wanted to be.”
What works? What makes sense? She learned to ask those and similar practical questions as a child of the desert Southwest. For her ranching parents and the cowboys who worked for them on the 198,000-acre ranch, those were the questions at hand as they responded to the exigencies of frontier life, where water was scarce, the wind blew constantly and the harsh land and climate were unforgiving.
“The value system we learned was simple and unsophisticated and the product of necessity,” O’Connor wrote. “What counted was competence and the ability to do whatever was required to maintain the ranch operation in good working order — the livestock, the equipment, the buildings, wells, fences, and vehicles. Verbal skills were less important than the ability to know and understand how things work in the physical world. Personal qualities of honesty, dependability, competence, and good humor were valued most.”
As Chief Justice John Roberts noted in a statement after her death, O’Connor also was “fiercely independent.” That too was a trait she no doubt learned on the Lazy B.
And, of course, she was a trailblazer. The role came naturally to her. “I cannot remember a time when I did not ride,” she recalled. “Before I rode occasionally on the roundup, it was an all-male domain. Changing it to accommodate a female was probably my first initiation into joining an allmen’s club, something I did more than once in my life. After the cowboys understood that a girl could hold up her end, it was much easier for my sister, my niece, and the other girls and young women who followed to be accepted in that rough-and-tumble world.” (A record four women now serve on the Supreme Court.)
More often than not, O’Connor was a conservative vote on the court — not surprising for a fiercely independent Westerner — but, unlike her successor, Samuel Alito, she was never an ideologue. As a moderate Republican with experience in the give-and-take of electoral politics, she considered herself a pragmatist who relied more on common sense than hard-edged legal philosophy. We would argue that the nation was better served by her inclination to seek consensus on the court and, as in the Arizona Senate, to compromise.
“Eternally a ranch girl, she wanted solutions that really worked and had little patience for esoteric theory that had no grounding in reality,” a former O’Connor clerk, RonNell Andersen Jones, wrote on the website SCOTUSblog in 2012 (as reported by the Washington Post).
Seeking common ground on a ferociously difficult issue, for example, she voted with the majority in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed the constitutional right to an abortion established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. Overruling Roe “under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason to re-examine a watershed decision,” she wrote in a joint opinion with Justices David Souter and Anthony Kennedy, “would subvert the court’s legitimacy beyond any serious question.” In the roiling wake of last year’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision to overturn Roe, she has been proved prescient.
In 2003, she wrote that a Texas law banning sodomy was “directed toward gay persons as a class” and in Lawrence v. Texas voted to overturn it. A law based on “moral disapproval of that class … runs contrary to the values” of the Constitution, she wrote. The ruling laid the groundwork for the court’s 2015 decision legalizing same-sex marriage. That ruling holds, despite rumblings from Justice Clarence Thomas about overturning it.
O’Connor also was an author, along with Souter, of a major campaign finance ruling, McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, in 2003. The compromise decision upheld major portions of a 2002 law co-sponsored by her fellow Arizonan, U.S. Sen. John McCain, that sought to limit how money was raised and spent on political campaigns. In its 2010 ruling in the notorious Citizens United case, the court by a vote of 5-4 gutted the law. Alito, of course, voted with the majority; the untoward influence of the billions we spend on campaigns every election season since speaks for itself.
Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU and author of a recently published book on the Supreme Court, finds it significant that O’Connor was the last elected official to serve on the high court, an experience that gave her a sense of the possible, as well as an appreciation for judicial restraint in light of real-world realities.
“She understood the proper role of the Court,” Waldman posted on X. “She forged consensus on issues including affirmative action and abortion rights that allowed society to develop without ideological interference from the Supreme Court.”
Linda Greenhouse, writing the O’Connor obituary in the New York Times, noted that she was the most powerful woman in America during much of her tenure. “Very little could happen without Justice O’Connor’s support,” Greenhouse wrote, “when it came to the polarizing issues on the court’s docket, and the law regarding affirmative action, abortion, voting rights, religion, federalism, sex discrimination and other hot-button subjects was basically what Sandra Day O’Connor thought it should be.
“That the middle ground she looked for tended to be the public’s preferred place as well was no coincidence,” Greenhouse added, “given the close attention Justice O’Connor paid to current events and the public mood.”
Her successor and his radical cohorts have dismantled a number of her important decisions. They seem not only oblivious to “current events and the public mood” but driven by ideology while claiming to follow history and tradition.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that two decades after O’Connor’s departure from the court, the nation is in a fractious, angry mood, and the high court itself faces a crisis of legitimacy. Even those of us who at times disagreed with her opinions are likely to concede that the court and the nation would be in much better condition if the cowgirl from the Lazy B were still riding herd. We miss Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and the wisdom she imparted to a once-revered court.