Sandra Day O’Connor, former Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, died Friday morning at the age of 93, according to a statement from the court. She passed away at home in Phoenix, Arizona, a state in which she grew up and lived most of her life, from a respiratory illness and complications of dementia.
The former associate justice had announced in 2018 that she had received a diagnosis for the disease. O’Connor was, among other things, the first woman to serve on the country’s highest court.
O’Connor is well known for her prevalence as an associate justice during her 24 years on the Supreme Court, which was referred to as the “O’Connor Court” despite William H. Rehnquist serving as chief justice during most of her time there according to the New York Times. She was nominated to the court in 1981 by Ronald Reagan as a promise to nominate a female justice. She retired in 2006 and was succeeded by Samuel Alito.
During her tenure on the court, O’Connor was often the center of a politically divided group of justices. Upon retiring, according to the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute, she had been the deciding vote in more than 350. Some of these deciding votes included the 1992 vote to affirm the right to an abortion and a 2003 vote to defend affirmative action.
On a perhaps more controversial note, O’Connor tended to vote with her conservative colleagues on racial discrimination cases and cast the deciding vote that gave George W. Bush the presidency over Al Gore. Newsweek reported that O’Connor had not been in favor of a Gore victory in 2000, doing so much as to make audible complaints at an election night party when he was pulling narrowly ahead. Her husband, John Jay O’Connor, explained that she wanted to retire and be replaced by a Republican, but this account has been disputed by some, including legal scholar Richard K. Neumann, Jr.. Nevertheless, she joined the majority opinion that the Florida recount was unconstitutional and could not proceed, handing Bush a narrow victory.
In a comment to the Chicago Tribune’s Editorial Board in 2013, O’Connor expressed mild regret that the Supreme Court took the decision into their hands, saying that it “gave the court a less than perfect reputation.”
Despite this, O’Connor’s story is a champion for women. She graduated top of her Stanford Law School class but only one out of the nearly 40 firms that she called for a job would offer her one. The position? Legal secretary. She was made assistant state attorney general in 1965 and ran for a state senate seat in Arizona in 1969 and served there for five years, becoming the first woman Republican majority leader in 1972. In 1974 she won a seat on the Arizona State Court. And in 1981, she succeeded Justice Potter Stewart after the country’s first televised Supreme Court confirmation hearing ended in a 99-0 vote in her favor. In 2009, then-President Barack Obama awarded her the presidential medal of freedom.
O’Connor had not only a political, but physical impact on the Supreme Court. Before her tenure there had been no women’s bathroom near the courtroom; one was designated when she joined the bench. The Ladies Dining Room — designated for spouses — became the Dorothy Cornell Rehnquist Dining Room (named after then Chief Justice Rehnquist’s wife).
In the end, O’Connor was a cowgirl. She grew up on her family’s “Lazy B” ranch on the Arizona-New Mexico border and championed anti-federalism in many of her court votes. In fact, that’s what she called herself: at her induction ceremony to the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas, she said that she was “the first cowgirl to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.”