Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman on the Supreme Court, dead at 93
Kaelan Deese Noah Garfinkel
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Pioneering Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a swing vote for decades on the nation’s highest court, died at age 93.
O’Connor, who graduated from law school in just two years at a time when few women even attended, was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and was unanimously approved by the Senate, becoming the first woman to serve on the high court. The Supreme Court announced her death in a statement, noting she died from “complications related to advanced dementia, probably Alzheimer’s, and a respiratory illness.”
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More than 10 years after O’Connor retired from the Supreme Court, she said in 2018 that she was withdrawing from public life due to her dementia diagnosis.
O’Connor, a centrist Republican, provided the deciding vote in many cases on hot-button topics, including in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In that case, she refused to end the right to abortion set in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, despite pressure from many to do so. As a co-author on the plurality opinion, O’Connor helped the court instead take a middle ground, affirming the right to abortion but allowing for individual states to set up some restrictions on abortion itself, so long as the restrictions placed no “undue burden” on a woman’s ability to access the procedure.
Most recently, that “undue burden” standard was used by the Supreme Court in the Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt case in 2016, which struck down abortion restrictions in Texas.
O’Connor also voted to uphold affirmative action, once again striking a balance between liberal and conservative justices. In the case of Grutter v. Bollinger, she wrote the majority opinion that upheld Michigan Law School’s use of race in admissions. She went on to say that she hoped there would be a “logical endpoint” to the use of race in admissions, at which point everyone could be incorporated into society rather than separated into groups as part of their identity.
One of her other most consequential cases was her 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore. She voted with the majority to stop the recount of votes in Florida after the 2000 presidential election, reversing the decision of the Florida Supreme Court. Because the initial count and recount both ended in George W. Bush’s favor, the decision gave him the election victory over former Vice President Al Gore.
O’Connor said in 2013 that the court maybe should not have taken the controversial case and that it gave the court a “less-than-perfect reputation.”
Born on March 26, 1930, O’Connor grew up on a ranch in Arizona but lived with her grandmother in El Paso, Texas, to attend private school. She graduated from high school in two years and was admitted to Stanford University at just 16 years old, graduating in 1950 with a bachelor’s degree in economics. She was admitted to Stanford Law School, where she dated future Chief Justice William Rehnquist and met John Jay O’Connor III, whom she married shortly after graduating in 1952.
“Sandra’s accomplishments don’t make me a lesser man,” John Jay O’Connor III said when asked after his wife’s Supreme Court nomination about how he viewed being in a supporting role. “They make me a fuller man.”
After graduating, the two settled in Arizona but left to live and practice in Germany for three years before returning. O’Connor, who took time off after the births of her three children, became the state’s assistant attorney general before being appointed to fill a state Senate seat in 1969. In 1970, she won reelection and eventually became Arizona’s Senate majority leader, the first woman to be the majority leader of any state Senate. She was elected to serve as a judge for the Superior Court in Maricopa County in 1974 and then served on the Arizona State Court of Appeals starting in 1979 until her appointment to the Supreme Court.
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O’Connor, who was treated successfully for breast cancer in 1988, retired from the high court in 2006 to take care of her husband, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for nearly two decades. He died in 2009.
She is survived by her three sons: Scott, Brian, and Jay.