Justice O’Connor Continued Public Service Long After Retirement

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement from the US Supreme Court in 2006 was anything but relaxing and notable for the degree to which she stayed in the public eye.

Unlike other justices, who retire due to bad health or die in office, O’Connor, who died Friday morning at the age of 93, was in good physical and mental condition when she left the bench at the age of 75. She stepped away to be with her husband, John, in the final years of a long struggle with Alzheimer’s. He died in 2009.

Until her own Alzheimer’s diagnosis forced her out of the public eye nearly a decade later, O’Connor remained engaged in public life as a champion of judicial independence and civics education, especially for young students.

“Justice O’Connor always had an immense amount of energy, and retiring didn’t change that,” said Yale Law School professor Oona A. Hathaway, a former clerk.

O’Connor’s post-Supreme Court career included “riding circuit"—that is, hearing cases in lower federal courts from the New York-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco.

Justice David Souter, who retired shortly after O’Connor in 2009, was the last justice to hear cases in the lower courts. His strong and public dislike for Washington has kept him largely out of the national spotlight.

Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, and Stephen Breyer chose not to ride circuit. To varying degrees, they continued to appear in public, write books, and speak to legal groups.

None, though, have been as active as O’Connor.

From 2006-09, she was involved with the Sandra Day O’Connor Project at Georgetown Law, focusing on judicial independence and civic education.

Building off that work, she launched the Quality Judges Initiative at the University of Denver’s Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System in late 2009. Focusing on promoting commission-based appointment systems for state judges, rather than contested elections, the initiative continued its work through 2020.

She also served on the Iraq Study Group that assessed the Iraq War, taught courses at Arizona State University Law School, which was renamed in her honor in 2006, wrote a book on Supreme Court history, and even briefly appeared on “Jeopardy.”

Possibly her most consequential effort off the court was the creation of iCivics, a nonprofit that provides online, educational games designed to teach middle schoolers about the three branches of government and the relationship between the states and the federal government. By 2023, more than 9 million students used the group’s free resources annually, according to its website.

O’Connor often said “that she was prouder of iCivics than her work on the court,” said Meryl Chertoff, who directed her project at Georgetown Law.

Chief Justice John Roberts called her “an eloquent advocate for civics education,” in a press release announcing O’Connor’s death Friday.

Secular Religion

Hathaway said O’Connor exhibited the same tireless energy in retirement as she did as a justice, when she showed up at the court “early every day to exercise with her law clerks and friends from the neighborhood.” These classes went on until 2017, when the courthouse was closed to the group.

Judicial independence and civics were issues O’Connor cared about deeply long before she retired.

In a 2019 biography, Evan Thomas described O’Connor as having “a kind of secular religion beyond her belief in God"—a duty to serve the community. “She was a relentless apostle for service.”

Even before she was elected to the Arizona Legislature—where she was the first female majority leader of any US state legislative body—O’Connor was active in civic life.

“She was a deep believer in the importance of civic participation and the extraordinary power of representative democratic government,” Hathaway said.

She also made a point of advancing judicial independence as a state legislator.

One of her last legislative efforts, before becoming a state court judge herself, was to change Arizona’s judicial selection process from elections to a more merit-based system, Chertoff said. O’Connor believed elections risked creating the appearance of corruption, even if they didn’t corrupt judges.

O’Connor was among the last batch of judges who faces voters under the old system in Arizona, winning her seat in 1974.

Civics Education

Her commitment to civics education similarly grew out of her concern for judicial independence, Chertoff said.

As O’Connor traveled the country, she discovered few Americans understood how government worked, and how they could influence it, Hathaway said.

In particular, she wanted to focus on young people. If you waited too long to try to convince adults of the importance of civic participation, it wasn’t going to be as effective, Hathaway said.

Chertoff said one of O’Connor’s colleagues took her school-aged son to her chambers once, where they played online video games. That’s when O’Connor realized educational video games would be an ideal way to meet kids where they already were after watching a child visiting her chambers play online video games, Chertoff said. And what became iCivics was born.

Retiring from public life in 2018, O’Connor urged Americans in a letter to “commit to educating our youth about civics, and to helping young people understand their crucial role as informed, active citizens in our nation.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the third woman to join the Supreme Court, has taken over stewardship of the iCivics project.