Sandra Day O’Connor, Supreme Court’s First Woman, Dies at 93 (1)

Sandra Day O’Connor, who became the decisive vote on abortion, religion, race and other hot-button social issues during a history-making tenure as the first woman on the US Supreme Court, has died. She was 93.

She died Friday morning in Phoenix, Arizona, of complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness, the court announced. In 2018, at age 88, she announced that she had been diagnosed with dementia and would be stepping away from public activities.

Sandra Day O’Connor in 2002.

Photographer: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images

Appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1981, O’Connor served on the high court for 24 years while Republicans dominated the White House and the court took a turn toward conservative principles. Over time, O’Connor — who was the Republican leader of Arizona’s state senate before becoming a judge — came to hold the court’s ideological center.

She controlled the outcome of high-profile rulings, often through narrow decisions that focused on the particular facts of each case. A 2001 New York Times magazine profile dubbed her “America’s most powerful jurist.”

O’Connor was among the best-known of the justices and frequently appeared on lists of the most admired Americans. During her first term on the court, she received as many as 500 letters a week, many from young girls who saw her as a role model.

“A daughter of the American Southwest, Sandra Day O’Connor blazed an historic trail as our nation’s first female justice,” current Chief Justice John Roberts said on Friday. “She met that challenge with undaunted determination, indisputable ability, and engaging candor.”

Abortion Stance

From the moment Reagan announced that he would nominate O’Connor, one issue dominated discussion of her impact on the court: how she, as a Republican woman, would rule on legalizing abortion.

That day — July 7, 1981 — Reagan’s spokesman, Larry Speakes, told reporters that O’Connor had told Reagan that abortion “was especially abhorrent to her.” That phrase was cited by some Republican senators in explaining why they voted to confirm her in the face of protest by anti-abortion groups, who said her voting record in Arizona showed a more ambiguous stance.

Sandra Day O’Connor testifies at her confirmation hearing in September 1981.

Photographer: Keystone/Getty Images

Her Senate confirmation was unanimous, and in her early years on the court, O’Connor was sharply critical of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that made abortion a fundamental right.

So it was surprising to many when, in 1992, O’Connor joined the 5-4 majority that affirmed the constitutional right to abortion in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. The joint opinion written by O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Souter declared Roe v. Wade “a rule of law and a component of liberty we cannot renounce.” It also approved restrictions, such as requirements that minors get parental consent for an abortion.

Eight years later, O’Connor provided the fifth vote to strike down a Nebraska ban on the procedure opponents called “partial-birth” abortion. She said the law would be an “undue burden” on women seeking to end a pregnancy. The court upheld a similar federal law after O’Connor retired.

O’Connor retired in 2006. In 2022, a more conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and, by extension, a key part of her legacy.

ACLU Praise

O’Connor’s decisive votes on other social issues vexed many of her fellow Republicans and earned her the praise of the American Civil Liberties Union.

She wrote the court’s 5-4 decision in 2003 upholding race-conscious college admissions, so long as each applicant received individual consideration and wasn’t automatically given a preference on the basis of race.

She said government bodies could acknowledge religion as long as they stopped short of “endorsing” it. That approach meant making fine distinctions, as when she voted to allow a nativity scene that was part of a larger city-sponsored holiday display while rejecting a similar creche that stood by itself.

She also voted to bar a public high school graduation prayer by a rabbi. In the court’s 2001-2002 term, she joined a 5-4 majority that upheld for the first time a school voucher program allowing parents to use taxpayer funds to send their children to private schools, rejecting arguments that the plan unconstitutionally used public money to fund religious institutions.

Guantanamo Detainees

She wrote the lead opinion for the court when it ruled in 2004 that the federal government must give a hearing to American citizens held as enemy combatants at the US naval base on the coast of Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay. Those detained there were apprehended in the war on terror provoked by al-Qaeda’s attacks on the US on Sept. 11, 2001.

“A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation’s citizens,” she wrote.

O’Connor joined the 5-4 majority that stopped a ballot recount in Florida, ending the hotly contested 2000 presidential election in favor of Republican George W. Bush over Democrat Al Gore. The ideological divide in the case fueled criticism that the high court, which holds itself above partisanship, was in fact immersed in it.

In 2013, O’Connor said the court may have been better off not weighing in on the recount. The case “stirred up the public” and “gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation,” she told the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board.

“Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye,’” she said.

The Supreme Court in 1983. Back row L-R John Paul Stevens, Lewis F. Powell Jr., William Rehnquist, and Sandra Day O’Connor. Front row L-R: Thurgood Marshall, William J. Brennan Jr., Chief Justice Warren Burger, Byron White and Harry A Blackmun.

Photographer: MPI/Getty Images

Announcing her retirement in July 2005, she said she wanted to help care for her husband, John, who had Alzheimer’s disease. He died in 2009. Her departure was delayed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s death two months after her announcement, which complicated the succession process. She stayed on the court until January 2006, when the Senate confirmed Justice Samuel Alito to replace her.

Alito’s appointment shifted the court to the right on race, religion, abortion and campaign finance — and undid much of O’Connor’s work.

Hinted at Dismay

In a 2010 speech, she criticized the just-issued Citizens United ruling, which allowed unlimited corporate campaign spending. She said the ruling would energize an “arms race” in judicial elections and be a “problem for maintaining an independent judiciary.”

She hinted at her dismay at the court’s direction in the speech, saying, “Gosh, I step away for a couple of years and there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”

O’Connor was born Sandra Day on March 26, 1930, in El Paso, Texas, at the family home of her mother, the former Ada Mae Wilkey. Her father, Harry Day, was a second-generation cattle rancher and proprietor of the Lazy B Ranch in southeastern Arizona, on the New Mexico border.

O’Connor grew up at the Lazy B — named for the letter and style of its cattle brand — where she learned to ride horses, care for pets and handle farm equipment.

“We were isolated,” she recalled in an interview with PBS NewsHour in 2002. “We had no neighbors, really. It was 35 miles to town. We would go to town once a week to get the mail and some groceries. And the people at the ranch, in my early years, were my parents and the cowboys who worked there.”

Her sister, Ann, was born when she was 8, and their brother, H. Alan, arrived 18 months later.

Stanford Bound

“Always homesick” for the ranch, O’Connor lived with her grandparents in El Paso during the school year, she said in Lazy B, her 2002 memoir, written with her brother. Her primary-school education was at the private, all-girls Radford School. In 1946, at 16, she graduated from El Paso’s Austin High School and headed to Stanford University, where she majored in economics, with plans to return home to run the ranch.

A law class sparked her interest, and after graduation she entered Stanford Law School in California. She finished in two years instead of the customary three and met both her future husband, John Jay O’Connor, and Rehnquist, who would lead the court as chief justice for most of O’Connor’s tenure.

After receiving her law degree in 1952, she encountered difficulty finding employment in the male-dominated legal world.

She eventually landed her first job, as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California. She spent six years in private practice in Phoenix, and took about five years off to raise her three sons, Scott, Brian and Jay.

She re-entered the workforce as Arizona’s assistant attorney general, was appointed to a vacant seat in the state senate, twice won reelection and became majority leader.

As a senator, O’Connor “caused some astonishment when she came out in support of the proposed federal Equal Rights Amendment and then cast several votes that were taken as ‘pro-abortion’ by organizations that oppose abortion,” the New York Times reported in 1981.

She won election as a Superior Court judge in 1975, and was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals in 1979 by Governor Bruce Babbitt, a Democrat. She was a judge on the court in 1981 when Justice Potter Stewart informed the newly installed Reagan administration that he would be retiring.

Ronald Reagan and Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981.

Photographer: David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images

Reagan had promised during his 1980 campaign that one of his first Supreme Court appointments would be “the most qualified woman I could possibly find.” In announcing his selection of O’Connor, he said, “I pledged to appoint a woman who meets the very high standards I demand of all court appointees. I have identified such a person.”

O’Connor learned in 1988 that she had breast cancer and would need a mastectomy. She informed her colleagues in a typically matter-of-fact way, sending each a note saying, “please do not be unduly concerned about it.”

Years later, she said the experience “made me more aware than ever before of the transitory nature of life here on Earth.”

An avid golfer, she hit a hole-in-one in December 2000, just days after the ruling in Bush v. Gore.

In retirement, she was besieged with requests to give speeches, serve on panels and work for causes. She was on the independent commission that called for a gradual pullout of US forces from Iraq in 2006. She devoted much of her time to fighting to preserve judicial independence, urging states that elect judges to adopt appointment as a better method.

(Adds comment by Chief Justice John Roberts in sixth paragraph.)

To contact the reporter on this story:
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Laurence Arnold at larnold4@bloomberg.net

Lisa Beyer

© 2023 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Used with permission.