Sandra Day O'Connor

The Lazy B ran to 198,000 acres near Duncan, Arizona, and the house nine miles from the nearest paved road had no running water or electricity until she was seven. She shot coyotes and jackrabbits with a .22, drove as soon as she could see over the dashboard, and changed her own tires. Most of the school year she spent in El Paso with her grandmother. She graduated sixth in her class in 1946, went to Stanford at 16, took economics magna cum laude and a law degree in 1952, made the Order of the Coif, and worked on a law review edited by William Rehnquist. No firm would pay her. She got her first legal job by offering to do it for nothing, sharing a desk with a secretary.

Arizona came first — assistant attorney general from 1965, a seat in the state senate from 1969, and by 1973 the first woman to lead a state senate anywhere in the country. The Maricopa County Superior Court followed in 1975, the Arizona Court of Appeals in 1979. Then 24 years as an associate justice, with majority opinions in Strickland v. Washington, Grutter v. Bollinger and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. BriefHistory carries the nomination and the quarter century of rulings. What is left over is what it took to get there, and one December day.

On December 12, 2000, The Wall Street Journal reported that on election night her husband had told guests at a Washington party that she wanted to step down but would be reluctant to go if a Democrat chose her replacement. The paper cited three witnesses. O'Connor declined to comment. That same December day she was in the majority that stopped the Florida recount and wrote part of the unsigned opinion. Thirteen years later she told the Chicago Tribune the Court might have done better to say it would not take the case at all, that hearing it stirred up the public and gave the Court a less-than-perfect reputation, and that the justices had probably added to the problem. She spent her retirement arguing for judicial independence and for taking judicial selection out of politics.

In February 2009 she launched a civics website called Our Courts, which became iCivics the following May. By 2015 it had 72,000 teachers registered and its games had been played 30 million times. Obama gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. She kept hearing cases by designation in the federal district and appeals courts. Days after Antonin Scalia died in 2016 she said the sitting president should fill the seat. She published a letter in October 2018 saying she had early-stage dementia. She lay in repose in the Great Hall of the Supreme Court on December 18, 2023, and was buried from the Washington National Cathedral the next day.

Sandra Day O'Connor's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Strickland v. Washington case
  Her opinion setting the test for ineffective assistance of counsel 1984
• Planned Parenthood v. Casey case
  One of three authors of the lead opinion 1992
• Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest book
  Written with her brother, H. Alan Day 2002
• Grutter v. Bollinger case
  Her majority opinion on race-conscious law school admissions 2003
• Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case
  Her majority opinion on the detention of an American citizen 2004
• iCivics company
  Launched as Our Courts — 72,000 registered teachers by 2015 2009

• 1946 aged ~16 Graduates sixth in her class at Austin High School in El Paso Stanford took her at 16.
• December 20, 1952 aged 22 Marries John Jay O'Connor III at the family ranch She had taken her law degree six months earlier.
• 1953 aged ~23 Works unpaid as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California No law firm would hire a woman as a paid attorney.
• 1969 aged ~39 Appointed to fill a vacancy in the Arizona Senate, then elected
• 1973 aged ~43 Becomes the first woman to lead a state senate in the United States
• January 9, 1975 aged 44 Takes the bench on the Maricopa County Superior Court The Arizona Court of Appeals followed in December 1979.
• 1988 aged ~58 Treated for breast cancer while sitting on the Court She had her appendix out the same year.
• July 1, 2005 aged 75 Announces she will retire once a successor is confirmed
• October 2018 aged 88 Publishes a letter announcing early-stage dementia She died in Phoenix on December 1, 2023, at 93.

• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. nominated by
• William Rehnquist 1924–2005
  Chief justice who led the Court’s conservative shift toward federalism and limits on congressional power. law review editor, later her chief justice
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020
  Supreme Court Justice whose advocacy for gender equality made her a cultural icon. the second woman on the Court
• Antonin Scalia 1936–2016
  Justice whose advocacy of originalism and textualism transformed American legal interpretation. opposing pole on the same bench
• Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993
  First African American Supreme Court Justice and lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. the justice she joined in 1981
• George W. Bush b. 1946
  43rd president who led the country after the September 11 attacks and launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. received her retirement letter