Sandra Day O’Connor, who made history as the first female justice on the Supreme Court, died Friday morning. She was 93.
O’Connor, who retired from the high bench in 2006, 25 years after her nomination by President Ronald Reagan, passed away in her home state of Arizona due to complications from advanced dementia and a respiratory illness.
In 2018, O’Connor announced that she had been diagnosed with “the beginning stages of dementia, probably Alzheimer’s disease.”
Her husband, John O’Connor, died of complications of Alzheimer’s in 2009.
A moderate conservative, O’Connor was best known for her co-authorship of the majority opinion in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the justices ruled that state laws restricting abortion should not impose an “undue burden” on women seeking the procedure.
“Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that can’t control our decision,” O’Connor said from the bench, as she read a summary of the decision. “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”
That ruling was overturned in June 2022 by the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which returned responsibility for deciding restrictions on the procedure to the states.
The opinion in that case was written by O’Connor’s successor, Samuel Alito.
O’Connor also signed on to the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore, which put an end to the weeks-long drama of the 2000 presidential election by nixing then-Vice President Al Gore’s demands for a recount in Florida.
She also authored the decision in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger, which held that affirmative action programs based on race did not violate the 14th Amendment — a decision that was also overturned by the high court this past June.
The granddaughter of a pioneer who traveled west from Vermont and founded the family ranch some three decades before Arizona became a state, O’Connor had a tenacious, independent spirit that came naturally.
As a child growing up in the remote outback, she learned early to ride horses, round up cattle and drive trucks and tractors.
“I didn’t do all the things the boys did,” she told Time magazine in 1981, “but I fixed windmills and repaired fences.”
After her ascenscion to the Supreme Court, O’Connor remained the only woman on the bench until she was joined in 1993 by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Currently, the Supreme Court boasts four women: Amy Coney Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
O’Connor was regarded with great fondness by many of her colleagues.
When she retired, Justice Clarence Thomas called her “an outstanding colleague, civil in dissent and gracious when in the majority.”
O’Connor could, nonetheless, express her views tartly.
In one of her final actions as a justice, a dissent to a 5-4 ruling to allow local governments to condemn and seize personal property to allow private developers to build shopping plazas, office buildings and other facilities, she warned the majority had unwisely ceded yet more power to the powerful.
“The specter of condemnation hangs over all property,” she wrote. “Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing … any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.”
