Supreme Court justice paved path for women

Ex-state senator wielded political clout with a pragmatic approach to the law

One fall day in 2010, retired U.S. Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor slipped into the courtroom where she worked for nearly 25 years to take in an “amazing” sight.

The first — and for 12 years, the only — woman on the high court saw three women in black robes among the nine justices.

Recalling that day, O’Connor said she “saw a woman on the far right end of the bench, one on the far left end and one near the middle. That was pretty amazing.”

O’Connor lived to see four women serve at the same time on the Supreme Court. What was once a novelty when she was the first woman to sit on the high court has become almost commonplace.

In a sense, O’Connor was witnessing the culmination of her own journey, in which she struggled to get any legal job after graduating from law school in the 1950s, then ended more than 190 years of male exclusivity on the Supreme Court when president Ronald Reagan nominated her in 1981.

O’Connor, who left the court in 2006, died Friday in Phoenix of complications related to advanced dementia and a respiratory illness, the Supreme Court said. She was 93.

Before a woman led a presidential ticket and before a woman had served as secretary of state, O’Connor was known as the country’s most powerful woman. A one-time state senator in Arizona and the last justice to hold elected office, she wielded considerable political clout with a pragmatic approach to the law that at times 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 outlook, and the change in that one seat flipped 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 handiwork being dismantled, but she pushed on in retirement with devotion to new causes, arguing for enhanced civics education for schoolchildren, continued independence of judges and increased research dollars for Alzheimer’s disease, which had claimed the life of her husband, John. In recent years, O’Connor’s dementia had advanced and she had withdrawn from public life.

She announced in 2018 she had been diagnosed with “the beginning stages of dementia, probably Alzheimer’s disease.” Her husband died of complications of Alzheimer’s in 2009. O’Connor remained active in the government and otherwise even after she retired from the court. She sat as a judge on several federal appeals courts, advocated for judicial independence and served on the Iraq Study Group.