Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
Today’s Justice of the Day is: SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR. Justice O’Connor took the Judicial Oath to officially join the Supreme Court of the United States on this day, September 25, in 1981.
Justice O’Connor was born on March 26, 1930, in El Paso, Texas but was raised in Arizona, the state from which she would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. She attended Stanford University, graduating with an A.B. in 1950, before earning an LL.B. from Stanford Law School in 1952.
Like a great many women from her era, Justice O’Connor initially struggled to find work befitting her qualifications because of the deep institutional sexism that existed within nearly every law firm at the time. She ultimately decided to begin her career as a Deputy County Attorney in San Mateo County, California (located just south of San Francisco) in 1952, where she remained until 1953, the year before she became a Civil Attorney at the Quartermaster Market Center in Frankfurt, Germany, where she had moved with her husband after he was stationed there. Justice O’Connor and her husband returned to the U.S. in 1957, and she then entered private practice in Phoenix, Arizona. She continued working as a private attorney until 1965, when she became an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Arizona for four years, after which she took office as a Member of the Arizona State Senate. Justice O’Connor’s career in the Arizona legislature would see her go on to become the first woman Majority Leader of any federal or statewide elected legislative body in 1973, a position she would hold for the rest of her time there. She left office in 1974, the year before she became a Judge of the Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County. Justice O’Connor left that position to begin service as a Judge of the Arizona Court of Appeals in 1979, where she would remain until her appointment to the SCUS.
Justice O’Connor was nominated by President Ronald Reagan on August 19, 1981, to a seat vacated by Justice Potter Stewart. She was confirmed by the United States Senate on September 21, 1981, and received her commission the following day. Justice O’Connor served on the Burger and Rehnquist Courts, and assumed senior status on January 31, 2006.
Justice O’Connor was one of the most influential Members of the SCUS to serve during its contemporary period, in addition to being the Court's first female Justice. During her early years at the SCUS, she seemed to be a more or less lockstep conservative, as demonstrated by her votes in cases like Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), where she joined the odious Opinion of the Court in finding that gay and lesbian Americans were, for all intents and purposes, not entitled to any significant equal protection or due process-based rights under law (at least as far as their sexual orientation was concerned). However, Justice O’Connor underwent something of an ideological transformation in the early 1990’s, and ultimately became the most consequential swing Justice on many important cases. Early examples of this change can be found in her votes in cases like Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), where she wrote a joint opinion with Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and David Souter reaffirming the essential holding of Roe v. Wade (1973), and Romer v. Evans (1996), where she joined the Opinion of the Court in overturning an anti-LGBT Colorado ballot initiative. Justice O’Connor’s decision to retire while President George W. Bush was in office has also had highly consequential implications for the SCUS’s jurisprudence. This is due to the fact that her far more conservative successor, Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., has empowered the Court’s conservative block to radically redefine how the federal courts understand a host of important issues, most notably campaign finance, as seen in decisions like Citizens United v. FEC (2010) or McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), neither of which would likely have been possible had she remained on the bench.