Path to the Supreme Court
In 1952 the Los Angeles firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher considered the application of a Stanford Law graduate who had made the Law Review and the Order of the Coif, and offered her a job as a legal secretary. Twenty-nine years later a former partner of that firm, William French Smith, by then Attorney General of the United States, telephoned the same woman to talk about a seat on the Supreme Court. Sandra Day O'Connor told the story for the rest of her life without bitterness, which was characteristic, and without letting anyone forget it, which was also characteristic. 'After graduating near the top of my class at Stanford Law School in 1952, I was unable to obtain employment in a private law firm,' she told a commencement audience in 2004; there had been exactly one contingent offer, 'as a legal secretary.' The profession that would not hire her produced, in time, a justice who for a quarter century was by common reckoning the most powerful member of the Court: the first woman, and the deciding vote.
She was born in El Paso on March 26, 1930, and raised on the Lazy B, the cattle ranch her grandfather Henry Clay Day had founded in 1880 in the dry country along the Arizona-New Mexico line, some 250 square miles of it, run by her parents Harry and Ada Mae Day. The ranch had no electricity or running water in her earliest years, and it taught the lessons she quoted all her life: self-reliance, competence, and the uselessness of complaint. Because the ranch was too remote for schooling, she spent the school years in El Paso with her grandmother, at the Radford School and then Austin High, graduating at sixteen. Stanford took her at sixteen and gave her two degrees in six years: economics, magna cum laude, in 1950, and the law degree in 1952 after only two years. She stood, by the legend the newspapers fixed in 1981, third in a class of 102 whose first-ranked member was William Rehnquist (§100); Stanford's own account is that no official ranking survives, so the chapter reports the legend as a legend and the certainties as certainties: both were on the Law Review, both made the Order of the Coif, and Rehnquist proposed to her. 'To be specific, Sandy, will you marry me this summer?' he wrote in 1951, in a letter that stayed private until a biographer found it decades after they had spent a quarter century as colleagues. She declined, and in December 1952 married John Jay O'Connor III, a Stanford Law man a class behind her; they had three sons.
The wall she hit after graduation redirected the career. Public offices would take what the firms would not, and she talked her way into the San Mateo County attorney's office, offering in a long letter to work for nothing until a paid position opened. When John was drafted into the Judge Advocate General's Corps she practiced quartermaster contract law for the Army as a civilian in Frankfurt from 1954 to 1957. Then Phoenix, and the pattern of her rise: a neighborhood law office started with one colleague in a shopping center, civic work without end, assistant attorney general of Arizona from 1965, and in October 1969 an appointment by Governor Jack Williams to a vacant seat in the state senate. She won the seat twice in her own right, and for the 1973 and 1974 sessions her Republican colleagues chose her as majority leader, the first woman to lead the majority of a state senate anywhere in the United States. The legislative years were the making of her jurisprudence before she had one: coalition, compromise, the possible. In 1975 she moved to the bench of the Maricopa County Superior Court, and in 1979 Governor Bruce Babbitt, a Democrat, elevated her to the Arizona Court of Appeals, a bipartisan blessing that would shortly matter.
On October 14, 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan made a promise: 'one of the first Supreme Court vacancies in my administration will be filled by a woman, the most qualified woman I can possibly find.' Potter Stewart's retirement, effective July 3, 1981, called the promise due in the administration's sixth month. Smith telephoned the Arizona judge on June 25; she flew quietly to Washington and met Reagan on July 1; and on July 6 the president wrote in his diary, 'Called Judge O'Connor in Ariz. & told her she was my nominee for Supreme Ct.,' adding, as the protests of his own allies began, 'I think she'll make a good Justice.' He announced her the next morning as 'truly a person for all seasons.' The right's objections were immediate and abortion-shaped: the National Right to Life Committee's president called the nomination 'directly contrary to the Republican platform,' and when Jerry Falwell voiced the movement's concern, Barry Goldwater supplied the retort the wire services carried for weeks: 'Every good Christian ought to kick Jerry Falwell right in the ass.' The September hearings were the first confirmation hearings broadcast live in their entirety, and they blunted nothing; she declined to forecast her votes, promised her best judgment, and was confirmed 99 to 0 on September 21, 1981. On September 25 she took the oaths: the 102nd justice, and the first woman in the 191 years of the institution.
On the Supreme Court
The method arrived in her first term. Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan (1982) struck an all-male state nursing school's exclusion of a man, and required of any gender line 'an exceedingly persuasive justification,' the phrase Ruth Bader Ginsburg (§107) would arm to full strength in the VMI case fourteen years later; the first woman's first major opinion built the scaffolding the second woman finished. The rest of the toolkit followed: her Lynch v. Donnelly concurrence (1984) reoriented Establishment Clause law around endorsement, because government embrace of religion 'sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community'; Richmond v. Croson (1989) subjected racial set-asides to strict scrutiny, which exists, she wrote, to 'smoke out' illegitimate uses of race. What united the opinions was what maddened her critics: a preference for the narrow ground, the particular record, the standard over the rule. She had counted votes for a living, and she judged the way a legislative leader whips a caucus, one case at a time, holding the center because she stood on it.
The center held longest where the stakes were highest. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) she joined Anthony Kennedy (§104) and David Souter (§105) in the joint opinion that preserved what it called Roe's essential holding while replacing its framework with her own long-gestating test: 'An undue burden exists, and therefore a provision of law is invalid, if its purpose or effect is to place a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability.' In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) she wrote for five justices that a law school could consider race, because 'in order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity,' and she set the clock that became the opinion's epitaph: 'We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.' In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) she told a wartime president that 'a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens,' because an unchecked system of detention, she warned, 'carries the potential to become a means for oppression.' And in her last major dissent, Kelo v. New London (2005), she saw the eminent-domain future exactly: 'Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.' The record has its shadows. She was one of the five in Bush v. Gore, writing nothing; a Newsweek report, from two witnesses at an election-night party, had her saying 'This is terrible' when the networks first called Florida for Gore, an account that rests on their telling, and which this chapter records as the reported thing it is. And in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) she went only halfway, concurring on equal protection grounds while declining to renounce the Bowers vote she had cast in 1986.
The numbers describe the center seat with precision. By the Supreme Court Database's coding, as computed for this site, she cast a liberal vote in 38.8 percent of nearly 2,800 coded cases against a 48.8 percent average for the colleagues who sat with her, twenty-eighth of the thirty-three justices the site's panel ranks by raw share, rising to twenty-first when measured against her own bench. Her dissent rate is the tell: 12.4 percent against her colleagues' 19.1, because the law of a divided Court kept coming to where she stood. On the question that has run through the last three chapters, who moved, her file returns a fourth answer: the drift is real, 8.8 points toward the liberal side between her first third and her last, tenth largest in the database, but the decomposition cannot say whose it is; her own shift does not clear the statistical bar. The drift has an owner or an era, and the data declines to name which.
She left at the height of her powers for the oldest of reasons. On July 1, 2005, she sent President Bush a three-sentence letter retiring 'effective upon the nomination and confirmation of my successor,' a condition that stretched further than anyone intended: John O'Connor's Alzheimer's disease, widely reported as the reason she stepped away, was advancing; Rehnquist died that September, and John Roberts (§109), first named for her seat, was moved up to the Chief Justiceship; Harriet Miers was named and withdrew; and not until January 31, 2006, when Samuel Alito (§110) was confirmed to what the press had spent four months calling the O'Connor seat, did her twenty-four terms end. Retirement was a third career. She sat by designation on the courts of appeals, campaigned against elected judiciaries, and in 2009 founded iCivics, the online civics curriculum that reached millions of schoolchildren, on the theory that the Republic's survival is a taught skill. In October 2018 she said goodbye in public with the frankness of the ranch: 'Some time ago, doctors diagnosed me with the beginning stages of dementia, probably Alzheimer's disease.' The letter did not mourn. 'As a young cowgirl from the Arizona desert, I never could have imagined that one day I would become the first woman justice on the U.S. Supreme Court,' she wrote, and 'while the final chapter of my life with dementia may be trying, nothing has diminished my gratitude and deep appreciation for the countless blessings in my life.'
The final chapter was long, and history used it cruelly. Dobbs overruled Casey in June 2022; Students for Fair Admissions ended race-conscious admissions in June 2023, five years short of her twenty-five; the two great settlements of the center seat fell in successive Junes while their author lived out her diagnosis in Phoenix. She died there on December 1, 2023, at ninety-three, of what the Court's announcement called 'complications related to advanced dementia, probably Alzheimer's, and a respiratory illness.' The Chief Justice said she had 'blazed an historic trail as our Nation's first female Justice'; the president and the Chief Justice eulogized her at Washington National Cathedral on December 19. The settlements did not survive her. The trail did: on the morning she died, four women sat on the Supreme Court of the United States.
The Voting Record
How O'Connor voted in the 2,874 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1981 term through the 2005 term, using that database’s classification of each vote as liberal or conservative. The gold tick on each bar is the rate for the other justices sitting on those same cases.
Across the whole career O'Connor voted with Burger more than with anyone else — the same side of the judgment in 80.9% of their 503 divided cases — and with T. Marshall least, at 27.9%. See the matrices →Compared against the 14 colleagues O'Connor shared at least 300 divided cases with.
And O'Connor ended 8.8 points more liberal relative to those colleagues than at the start — the tenth-largest shift of the 27 justices with a long enough record to measure. See who changed →
Source · The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.) · how these figures are made
Key Decisions
Grutter v. Bollinger
2003 · 5–4Holding · A university may consider race as one factor in a holistic admissions process to achieve the educational benefits of diversity.
Role · O'Connor wrote for the Court, adding that she expected such preferences to be unnecessary within twenty-five years.
The high-water mark of affirmative action, embracing Powell's (§99) Bakke rationale, until the Court ended race-conscious admissions in 2023 — two decades ahead of her timetable.
Read the opinion →Planned Parenthood v. Casey
1992Holding · The 'central holding' of Roe is reaffirmed, but states may regulate abortion so long as they do not impose an 'undue burden.'
Role · O'Connor co-authored the controlling joint opinion with Kennedy (§104) and Souter (§105).
Preserved the constitutional right to abortion for a generation, on grounds of precedent and the Court's legitimacy, until Dobbs (2022, Alito §110).
Read the opinion →Hamdi v. Rumsfeld
2004Holding · A U.S. citizen detained as an enemy combatant is entitled to due process — notice and a meaningful chance to contest the detention. 'A state of war is not a blank check.'
Role · O'Connor wrote the plurality opinion.
A landmark check on executive power in the war on terror, insisting on the courts' role even in wartime.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States, and for much of her twenty-five years she was also its most powerful member — the pragmatic center of a closely divided Court, the justice whose vote decided cases on abortion, affirmative action, religion, the death penalty, and the 2000 election. Raised on a hard-scrabble Arizona cattle ranch, the Lazy B, and a top Stanford Law graduate who could not get a law firm to hire a woman as anything but a secretary, she built a career in Arizona politics — becoming the first woman to serve as majority leader of any state senate — before Ronald Reagan kept a campaign promise and named her to the Court in 1981. She distrusted sweeping rules, deciding narrowly and contextually, and that habit made her the swing vote of her era: Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which preserved the core of Roe; Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld affirmative action in her own hand; Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, where she wrote that 'a state of war is not a blank check.' Evan Thomas's First is the definitive biography. Begin there, then read Grutter to watch the center hold.
The Bookshelf
The definitive biography, and a superb one. Thomas, a veteran journalist and biographer with access to O'Connor's papers and to the justice herself, tells the whole arc — the ranch childhood, the barriers of the 1950s, the Arizona political rise, and the twenty-five years at the Court's balancing point — with narrative sweep and shrewd judgment about how she wielded power. He is especially good on her pragmatism and her care for the Court as an institution, and honest about the costs of a jurisprudence built on case-by-case balancing. The essential book. Random House.
The first major biography, by the veteran Court journalist Joan Biskupic — written while O'Connor still sat, and definitive on how the pragmatic Arizonan became the swing vote who decided abortion, affirmative action, and religion for a generation. Ecco.
The political scientist's study of O'Connor's method — the deliberate, accommodationist, case-by-case strategy that made her the Court's median vote and, for years, its most powerful member. The best account of how she actually wielded that power. Rowman & Littlefield.
A concise, readable life for the general reader, tracing the ranch-girl-to-swing-vote arc with a journalist's eye. (Linda Hirshman's Sisters in Law, 2015, tells O'Connor's story intertwined with Ginsburg's.) University of New Mexico Press.
O'Connor's memoir of the Arizona ranch where she grew up, written with her brother — not a book about the Court, but the key to the character who ran it from the center. The Lazy B's world of hard work, self-reliance, and practical problem-solving formed the temperament she brought to the bench: skeptical of abstraction, attentive to consequences, comfortable with judgment calls. Warm and vivid, it explains where the pragmatism came from. Random House. Pair it with her later reflections in The Majesty of the Law (2003).
O'Connor's reflections on the Court, its history, and the rule of law — accessible essays on the institution she helped steer, written in the middle of her decisive final decade. Random House.
The retired justice's affectionate tour of Supreme Court history and lore — the customs, personalities, and turning points of the institution, told with warmth by someone who reshaped it. Random House.
O'Connor's signature opinion, and the fullest expression of her pragmatic method. Upholding the University of Michigan Law School's consideration of race in admissions, she embraced Powell's Bakke diversity rationale and held that narrowly tailored affirmative action served a compelling interest — while famously adding that she expected such preferences would no longer be necessary in twenty-five years. The opinion governed university admissions until the Court rejected it in the Harvard and UNC cases (2023), two decades ahead of her timetable. Read it as the swing justice at the height of her power, deciding the nation's most divisive question in the middle register she preferred.
The extraordinary joint opinion — co-authored with Kennedy (§104) and Souter (§105), and widely understood to bear O'Connor's decisive imprint — that reaffirmed the 'central holding' of Roe v. Wade while replacing its trimester framework with her own 'undue burden' standard. Expected by many to overrule Roe, the three centrist Republicans instead preserved it on grounds of precedent and the Court's legitimacy, in language about not overruling under fire that would be quoted for decades. Read it beside Grutter to see the center at work on the hardest question of all — and beside Dobbs (2022), which finally swept it away.
O'Connor holding the center in the war on terror. Writing for a plurality, she held that even a citizen detained as an 'enemy combatant' is entitled to due process to contest the detention: 'a state of war is not a blank check for the President.' A characteristic O'Connor compromise between security and liberty, and a rebuke to unchecked executive power. Free online.
The standard modern biographical encyclopedia of the Court: a signed essay on each of the 110 justices from Jay to Alito, alphabetically arranged, by a named scholar or journalist. Length tracks reputation — two pages for Thomas Johnson, three for Woods, eleven for Holmes — which is itself a rough map of who the literature has bothered with. It is not a substitute for a biography, and for the justices who have never had one it is often the most careful short account in print. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The one-volume reference on the Court: more than a thousand signed entries on cases, doctrines, institutions and the justices, current to 2005. Cases and people share one alphabet, so a citation can be followed without changing volumes, and the biographical entries are short, written by specialists, and better than a longer sketch at carrying the historiography — what the argument about a justice currently is. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.Thomas, First — for the definitive life of the first woman on the Court
- 2.Grutter v. Bollinger — for her signature opinion and pragmatic method
- 3.Planned Parenthood v. Casey — for the centrist vote that preserved Roe for a generation
- 4.O'Connor, Lazy B — for the ranch origins of the pragmatism
- 5.Biskupic, The Most Influential Justice — for how the swing vote actually ran the Court
Where the Papers Are Kept
O'Connor's papers were placed at the Library of Congress and have been opened to researchers, documenting her twenty-five years at the center of the Court along with her Arizona political career and her later civic work. Because she sat at the decisive point in so many closely divided cases, her files — case histories, memoranda, and correspondence with colleagues across the spectrum — are a rich source for the inner workings of the Rehnquist Court. A major modern judicial archive. Visit →
Ideas for Further Research
- The power of the center. For years O'Connor was, by common reckoning, the most powerful jurist in America — not because she led a bloc but because she stood between them, so that the law often became whatever she would join. Study the swing justice as a structural phenomenon: how a narrowly divided Court concentrates power in a single pragmatic vote, and whether that is a strength (moderation, restraint) or a distortion (unpredictability, personal rule) of the judicial function.
- Narrow by design. O'Connor deliberately decided cases on the facts before her, resisting broad rules and bright lines; critics called the result unpredictable and unprincipled, admirers called it prudent and humble. Compare her contextual, standard-based method with the rule-based originalism of Scalia (§103), and ask which better serves a diverse country, litigants seeking guidance, and the Court's own legitimacy.
- The twenty-five-year clock. In Grutter O'Connor wrote that racial preferences in admissions should be unnecessary within a generation; the Court ended them at year twenty. Set her prediction against the outcome and against Casey's confidence that a settled precedent could hold, and study the risks of a jurisprudence that stakes constitutional rules on forecasts about how the country will change. Seat lineage: Potter Stewart §92 → Sandra Day O'Connor → Samuel Alito §110.