O'Connor, Sandra Day,
1930–2023, U.S. lawyer and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme
Court (1981–2006), b. El Paso, Tex. Graduating from Stanford law
school (1952), she returned to practice in her home state of Arizona. There
she was a state assistant attorney general (1965–69) and a Republican
state senator (1969–74). Appointed a state judge in 1974, she was in
1979 named to the Arizona Court of Appeals. In 1981, President Reagan
nominated her to the U.S. Supreme Court, where she became the first woman
justice. Except in cases of sexual discrimination and states' powers under
the federal system, she generally resisted judicial activism, emerging in
the 1990s as a frequent swing vote between more and less conservative blocs.
After leaving the Court, she served (2006) as a member of the Iraq Study
Group and as a federal appeals court judge.
See her Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest (with her brother, H. A. Day; 2001), The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice (2003), and Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court (2013); biography by E. Thomas (2019); study by J. Biskupic (2005); L. Hirshman, Sisters In Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World (2015).
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