WASHINGTON — On a fall day in 2010, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor slipped into the courtroom where she had worked for nearly 25 years to take in an “amazing” spectacle.
The first – and for twelve years the only – woman on the Supreme Court saw three women in black robes among the nine judges.
Reflecting on that day, O'Connor said she saw “a woman on the far right side of the couch, one on the far left and one almost in the middle. That was pretty amazing.”
O'Connor experienced four women serving on the Supreme Court at the same time. What was once a novelty when she was the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court has become almost commonplace.
In a sense, O'Connor witnessed the culmination of her own journey, in which she struggled to get a legal job after graduating from law school in the 1950s, and then ended over 190 years of male exclusivity in the Supreme Court when President Ronald Reagan nominated her in 1981.
O'Connor, who left the court in 2006, died Friday in Phoenix from complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness, the Supreme Court said. She was 93.
Before a woman was a presidential candidate and before a woman became secretary of state, O'Connor was known as the most powerful woman in the country. She was once an Arizona senator and the last judge to hold elected office. She wielded considerable political influence with a pragmatic approach to the law that sometimes irritated colleagues both to her left and right.
One measure of her influence was that the justice who took her place, Samuel Alito, had a more conservative view, and the change in that one seat changed the outcome in major cases involving abortion rights, school desegregation and campaign finance.
O'Connor once said she wasn't too happy to see her work being dismantled, but she pressed on in retirement, with a commitment to new causes, advocating for better citizenship education for schoolchildren, continued independence from judges and more research dollars for Alzheimer's disease. who had claimed the life of her husband John.
The court would become even more conservative, with the appointment of three justices by President Donald Trump. Last year, Alito and Trump appointees prevailed to end women's constitutional right to abortion, which O'Connor had tried to preserve thirty years earlier.
In June, the court ended affirmative action in college admissions, effectively overturning a 2003 O'Connor opinion.
In recent years, O'Connor's dementia had progressed and she had withdrawn from public life.
She announced in 2018 that she had been diagnosed with “the early stages of dementia, probably Alzheimer's disease.” Her husband died in 2009 from complications of Alzheimer's disease.
She was the granddaughter of a pioneer, and her independent, tenacious spirit came naturally. Sandra Day grew up on a ranch in Arizona without electricity and learned early to ride horses, round up cattle, and drive trucks and tractors.
“I didn't do everything the boys did,” she said in a 1981 Time Magazine interview, “but I fixed windmills and mended fences.”
When she first came to court, she didn't even have a place to go to the bathroom near the courtroom. This was quickly corrected, but she remained the only woman at court until 1993.
Then, to O'Connor's delight and relief, President Bill Clinton nominated Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Although they looked and sounded nothing alike, lawyers sometimes misidentified one as the other. That prompted the judges to get T-shirts to help. The front of the shirt said 'The Supremes'. The back of O'Connor's shirt read: “I'm Sandra, not Ruth.”
Ginsburg, who died in 2020 at the age of 87, reportedly called O'Connor “an amazing big sister.”
The enormous response to O'Connor's appointment had surprised her. She received more than 60,000 letters in her first year, more than any member in the court's history.
“When I was appointed, I had no idea how much it would mean to so many people across the country,” she once said. “It touched them in a very personal way. People saw it as a signal that there are virtually unlimited possibilities for women. It is important for parents for their daughters, and for daughters for themselves.”
At times the constant publicity was almost unbearable. “I never expected or aspired to become a Supreme Court judge. During my first year on the field, I sometimes craved ambiguity,” she said.
After her retirement, O'Connor expressed regret that no woman had been chosen to replace her. She was pleased when President Barack Obama chose Sonia Sotomayor to replace David Souter in 2009, but said, “It's not enough.”
The following year, Obama appointed another woman, Elena Kagan, to the court, giving it three female justices for the first time.
Trump appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ginsburg, and when Justice Stephen Breyer retired last year, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the court, the first time four women have served together.
That still wasn't enough for Ginsburg, who once said she would be satisfied if all nine justices were women.
O'Connor showed a sense of humor even when he was belittled.
When a seemingly forgetful New York Times writer referred to the “nine men” of the SCOTUS (United States Supreme Court) in 1983 about Washington shorthand names, O'Connor responded with an adjustment.
“According to the information I had, and which I had assumed was generally available, SCOTUS had not consisted of nine men for more than two years,” she wrote.
In her letter, O'Connor referred to herself as FWOTSC — an acronym for “First Woman on the Supreme Court.”
“You can't be around her often without seeing traces of her wonderful sense of humor,” said Ruth McGregor, one of O'Connor's first clerks at the Supreme Court, years after she left that job. “She just gets a kick out of so many things.”
O'Connor remained active in government and otherwise even after she retired from the court. She has served as a judge on several federal appeals courts, advocated judicial independence and was a member of the Iraq Study Group. She was also appointed to the honorary post of chancellor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.
She championed research into Alzheimer's disease and the need for citizenship education. O'Connor plugged her new children's book into David Letterman's late-night program on CBS and traded jokes with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central's “Daily Show.”
O'Connor cited her husband's battle with Alzheimer's disease as her main reason for leaving the court. But he deteriorated so quickly that O'Connor soon took him to an assisted living center. John O'Connor began a romance with a fellow Alzheimer's patient, a relationship that experts say is not unusual among people with dementia.
The retired judge was relieved to feel comfortable and happy at the center, her son Scott said. Two other sons, Brian and Jay, also survive her.
She once described herself and her eight fellow judges as nine firefighters.
“If (someone) starts a fire, we are invariably asked to fight the fire. We may arrive on the scene a few years later,” she said.
O'Connor announced her retirement in a one-sentence written statement. She mentioned her age, then 75, and said she “needs to spend time” with her family.
She was 51 when she joined the court to replace the retired Potter Stewart. Until her appointment, she was virtually unknown on the national stage. She was an Arizona judge and previously a member of her state legislature.
Her career did not start promisingly. As a high-ranking graduate of Stanford's prestigious law school, class of 1952, O'Connor discovered that most major law firms were not hiring women.
A Los Angeles firm offered her a job as a secretary.
Perhaps it was that early experience that shaped O'Connor's professional tenacity.
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Richard Carelli, a former Supreme Court reporter for The Associated Press who is now retired, contributed to this story.
