Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court’s First Woman Justice, Has Died

Sandra Day O’Connor, who made American history by becoming the first woman to sit on the US Supreme Court, has died, according to reports. The Supreme Court cited the late justice’s cause of death as complications due to dementia. O’Connor was 93. 

She is survived by her three sons, Scott, Brian, and Jay; six grandchildren; and her brother, Alan.

In a letter shared with the press in 2018, O’Connor disclosed her diagnosis and announced her withdrawal from public life. “I will continue living in Phoenix, Arizona, surrounded by dear friends and family,” she wrote. “While the final chapter of my life with dementia may be trying, nothing has diminished my gratitude and deep appreciation for the countless blessings in my life… As a young cowgirl from the Arizona desert, I never could have imagined that one day I would become the first woman justice on the US Supreme Court.”

The daughter of a rancher, O’Connor was born in Texas on March 26, 1930, growing up between El Paso and a 198,000-acre cattle ranch near Duncan, Arizona, called the Lazy B. (She had two younger siblings, Alan and Ann Day, the latter of whom would serve in the Arizona Legislature.) After graduating from high school—she was the sixth in her class—O’Connor matriculated to Stanford University, where she earned her BA in economics in 1950 and then her law degree in 1952. In law school she served on the Stanford Law Review with future Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist and started dating the man who would become her husband, John J. O’Connor III. (The pair married in December 1952.)

After Stanford, Sandra Day O’Connor worked for a time as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California, before traveling with her husband to Germany, where they worked for several years. On their return to the United States, they started a family in Maricopa County, Arizona, as she opened a suburban law office and became involved with politics as a moderate Republican. In the 1960s and ’70s, she would go on to work as an assistant state attorney general and be named to Arizona’s intermediate appeals court by Democratic governor Bruce Babbitt.

Called the most powerful woman in America after her historic appointment to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1981 at 51 years old—“I happily share the honor with millions of American women of yesterday and today whose abilities and conduct have given me this opportunity for service,” she said in her opening statement—Sandra Day O’Connor served in that position for more than 24 years. She often cast the deciding vote in cases related to affirmative action, abortion, sex discrimination, voting rights, and other issues. (Among these was Bush v. Gore, the case that determined the highly contentious 2000 presidential election.)

So too did she wield a singular influence on the makeup of courts across the country. “The minute I was confirmed and on the court, states across the country started putting more women...on their Supreme Courts,” Sandra Day O’Connor once said. “And it made a difference in the acceptance of young women as lawyers. It opened doors for them.” She would be joined by the US Supreme Court’s second-ever female justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in 1993. 

In January 2006, the justice retired from the bench to care for her husband, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s. (He would die a few years later, in 2009.) During her retirement years, Sandra Day O’Connor remained a fierce advocate for judicial independence and civics education.

The news of Sandra Day O’Connor’s death prompted a rush of tributes and appreciations across the internet on Friday. Read some of them below.

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