

She was the first woman to be appointed to the Court. Among her other philanthropic endeavors, O'Connor was a founding co-chair of the National Advisory Board at the National Institute for Civil Discourse, which was created at the University of Arizona following the shooting of Gabby Giffords in 2011.Sandra Day O'Connor (born 1930) is a retired associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, serving from her appointment in 1981 by Ronald Reagan until her retirement in 2006.
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Soon, the site evolved into iCivics, which offers various free lesson plans and educational games. The same year, she launched Our Courts, a website designed to provide interactive civics lessons to teachers and students. In 2009, O'Connor founded the Sandra Day O'Connor Institute, a non-profit organization committed to championing civic engagement and education. In 2018, she herself was diagnosed with a form of dementia. Since then, O'Connor worked to raise awareness of the illness. For close to 20 years, her husband had Alzheimer's he passed away in 2009. When O'Connor served on the Court, the couple was active in the Washington, DC social scene. In 1952, O'Connor married her husband John Jay O'Connor III, who was a fellow student at Stanford Law School. Additionally, O'Connor published various essays in such publications as the Denver University Law Review and the Financial Times, and penned the 2013 book "Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court." Personal Life and Philanthropy In the spring of 2006, she began teaching an annual two-week class at the University of Arizona's James E. She also spoke at a number of venues, including Georgetown University, the Elon University School of Law, and the William & Mary School of Law. Overall, on the Court, O'Connor was known for her case-by-case approach to issues, a tack some saw as reasonable while others found it lacking in a coherent judicial philosophy.įollowing her retirement, O'Connor continued to hear cases in federal district courts and courts of appeals. When it came to abortion, O'Connor generally deviated from the dominant conservative ideology in her support of a woman's right to choose. She was more consistent in her upholding of the Fourth Amendment. In numerous of her court decisions, O'Connor was unpredictable when it came to First Amendment Establishment Clause issues. Gore, in which she facilitated the end of Gore's presidential hopes. O'Connor was part of the majority in such major cases as Grutter v. On the Court, she mostly joined the conservative voting bloc of Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and William Rehnquist however, she was also often the swing vote. In September, O'Connor was confirmed by the Senate with a 99-0 vote, the most votes in the history of US Supreme Court confirmations. He followed through on his pledge in the summer of 1981, when he nominated O'Connor.

O'Connor was then promoted to the Arizona State Court of Appeals.ĭuring his presidential campaign in 1980, Ronald Reagan vowed that he would appoint the first woman ever to the US Supreme Court. In 1974, she was appointed to the Maricopa County Superior Court, where she served from 1975 to 1979. O'Connor ended up winning the election for that seat in 1972, becoming in the process the first woman to serve as a state's majority leader in the Senate. From 1965 to 1969, she served as assistant Attorney General of Arizona subsequently, she was appointed to fill a vacancy in the state's Senate. There, O'Connor volunteered in a number of political organizations, and worked on the presidential campaign of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Following three years there, they returned to the United States and settled in Maricopa County, Arizona. When her husband was later drafted, she left with him to work in Germany as a civilian lawyer for the Army's Quartermaster Corps. Career BeginningsĪfter graduating from law school, O'Connor married and became a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California. She went on to obtain her law degree from Stanford Law School in 1952. Subsequently, O'Connor attended Stanford University, from which she graduated magna cum laude in 1950 with her bachelor's degree in economics. For her early education, she lived in El Paso with her grandmother and went to the Radford School for Girls she eventually graduated from Austin High School in 1946. O'Connor had a younger sister named Ann, who served in the Arizona Legislature, and a younger brother named Alan. She was raised on a 198,000-acre cattle ranch close to Duncan, Arizona, and grew up hunting coyotes and jackrabbits. Sandra Day O'Connor was born on Main El Paso, Texas to Ada Mae and rancher Harry.
