Sandra Day O’Connor still has a lot of work to
do. The first woman on the United States Supreme Court
who recently described herself as “a retired cowgirl”
continues to break new ground as an advocate for judicial
independence and better civic education. Her independent
spirit can be traced back to her life’s beginning
on a working ranch in Arizona, and spans decades of
public service.
Early Years
The basic facts of Justice O’Connor’s biography
have been recounted both by herself and others, notably
in the moving memoir Lazy B, an account of
her early years. Born March 26, 1930 in El Paso, Texas,
she was the first child of Ada Mae and Harry Day. Ada
Mae had left the Lazy B Ranch and her husband of three
years to give birth to the couple’s first child
near her own mother’s home and a city hospital.
Mother and daughter returned to the semi-arid high desert
plateau region on the New Mexico-Arizona border, along
the Gila River, just as the Depression took hold.
What was it like growing up on the ranch with her parents,
younger brother and sister? Said O’Connor: “we
were isolated. We had no neighbors, really. It was thirty-five
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.”1
The key to survival of the ranch, its people and its
livestock, she writes, was
Rain …our life’s blood…we would
watch with wonder the changed world about us. The
dry, dusty soil was wet, muddy, brown rivulets of
water running down every slope and gully—the
grass and plants sparkling with drops of water clinging
to them—the greasewood bushes normally so gray-green
and dull, releasing their incredible perfume, produced
by the rain on their dense, oily leaves. The birds
chirping frantically, the rabbits peeking out from
their burrows. Everything stirring and excited from
the rain, and no one more excited than my father.
We were saved again — saved from the ever- present
threat of drought, of starving cattle, of anxious
creditors.2
As she portrays them in her biography, O’Connor’s
father, Harry Day, was a tough self-reliant, domineering
figure. Her mother was a self-possessed lady, who dressed
with style and inculcated in young Sandra a love of
books and music. Her parents loved ranch life, but kept
an eye on the wider world, too. Sandra grew up as a
friend of cowboys, but she was sent to El Paso for high
school, to a more refined milieu than the ranch.
After graduating high school in 1946, Sandra Day attended
Stanford College and Law School. A classmate in law
school was fellow Arizonan William Rehnquist, who became
a lifelong friend, and would, as Chief Justice of the
United States Supreme Court, be O’Connor’s
trusted colleague. It was during her time at Stanford
Law School as well, that Sandra Day met another classmate,
John O’Connor, the son of a San Francisco physician.
The two were married a few days before Christmas in
1952 at the Lazy B.
Public Service
The new law school graduate, a member of the law review
and in the top ten percent of her graduating class,
could find no work as an attorney. The 1950’s
were not an easy time for women to be attorneys. One
prominent San Francisco firm, after refusing to hire
her as an attorney, offered Sandra Day O’Connor
a job as a legal secretary.
Government law offices proved more welcoming than corporate
law firms. O’Connor’s first job after law
school had her handling civil cases in the San Mateo
County, California, attorney’s office. When her
husband was drafted into the Army in 1953, O’Connor
accompanied him to his post in Germany, and worked as
a civilian attorney in the United States Quartermasters
Corps. Upon her return to the States, again, her path
was more rough-and-tumble than that of many Stanford
classmates—she and a fellow attorney set up a
two-person practice in a shopping center in Phoenix.
They took any case they could get, mostly small matters
like contracts, leases, divorces and criminal cases
in the local courts.
After giving birth to two sons, O’Connor gave
up practicing law for five years to stay home and raise
her boys, who soon numbered three. Her involvement in
public life hardly ceased, though. She was active in
Republican politics, President of the Phoenix Junior
League and made her home a hub of Phoenix social life
at a time that the city was booming. Her network of
contacts in Arizona politics helped her land a position
as an Assistant Attorney General for the state, and
in 1969 she made the leap into a major political appointment—filling
the unexpired term of Isabel Burgess, an Arizona State
Senator who had been appointed to the National Transportation
Safety Board by newly-elected President Richard Nixon.
O’Connor was quite successful as a state legislator.
She won election to the seat she had been appointed
to, and sat on a series of powerful committees. She
had a knack for bringing people together across party
lines, and forging practical solutions. In addition
to legislation secure equal pay for equal work, and
better opportunities for Arizona women, one of her many
accomplishments in this time was moving legislation
through the Arizona legislature that made Arizona a
state that uses the “merit selection” system
to select its judges, rather than partisan elections.
The system is widely credited with improving the quality
of the Arizona judiciary, a court that now, it might
be noted, is led by Chief Justice Ruth V. McGregor—Justice
Sandra Day O’Connor’s first law clerk.
The High Court
By the time Ronald Reagan made the momentous choice
to appoint O’Connor to the High Court in 1981,
she had been an appellate court judge in Arizona for
about two years. She and Reagan shared the independent
spirit of Westerners, and were both optimistic and plain
in their speech. While Reagan left their White House
meeting on July 1, 1981 determined that O’Connor’s
name would appear on his “short list” for
Supreme Court Justice, O’Connor left the meeting
confident that she would never be asked to serve, and
she “breathed a sigh of relief and came home”.3
Her modesty was misplaced. O’Connor became President
Reagan’s choice to replace Potter Stewart on the
Court.
On September 25, 1981, the country witnessed the swearing-in
of the first woman ever to become an Associate Justice
of the Supreme Court. In the years that followed, feminists
expected O’Connor to fulfill their agenda on a
spectrum of issues; conservatives expected that as a
Reagan appointee she would cleave to a conservative
social agenda. Both groups were disappointed—O’Connor
has been unfailingly independent in adhering to her
own view of the rule of law and the Constitution. She
has defied categorization as leaning right or left in
any sense in her years on the Supreme Court, frustrating
social activists on both sides of issues such as affirmative
action and abortion.
As a former state legislator, O’Connor was persuasive
with colleagues, and good at steering the court to consensus.
Her jurisprudence shows a marked pragmatism. Was her
perspective as the first woman appointee unique? As
O’Connor herself has put it:
In the exercise of my power as a Justice of the Supreme
Court, there are institutional constraints that strictly
limit what I can do. Concerns for the integrity of
the Court, the operation of the collective decision-making
process, and most important, the law itself—as
embodied in the Constitution, congressional statutes
and the Court’s prior case law—exert an
influence on my actions far greater than any uniquely
feminine perspective I might bring…I might add
that I work with eight very strong-willed colleagues.
I don’t think any of us exerts much power over
the others…my power on the Court depends on
the strength of my arguments, not on my gender.4
And the power of those arguments continue, even after
her 2006 retirement from the Court. Her departure was
precipitated by her beloved husband John’s battle
with Alzheimer’s disease. As she puts it, her
husband “needed some care and attention”
that she could not provide from Washington, DC. But
O’Connor’s retirement has been anything
but quiet. She has become a vigorous advocate of improved
civic education for young people, and speaks out for
judicial independence both in the US and in the developing
world. She continues to seek practical nonpartisan solutions
to problems and to stand up for what she believes. Her
travel and speaking schedule would quickly tire out
a person half her age. But Justice O’Connor keeps
on going. Everywhere she goes it seems, there is a thirst
for her simple words and her passionate advocacy of
her pragmatic message. She has inspired a generation
of women lawyers and judges, but she refuses to be cabined
by the label of feminist. The daughter of the Lazy B
remains an independent thinker who speaks her mind.
1 PBS Newshour interview, Feb. 1, 2002.
2 O'Connor, Sandra Day and Day, H. Alan,
Lazy B (New York: Random House, 2002), 131-132.
3 Interview with O’Connor on KAET Horizons
television program, November 27, 2002.
4 O'Connor, Sandra Day, The Majesty of
the Law (New York: Random House, 2003), 195. |
