Sandra Day O'Connor, Who Was Not As Bad As Other Conservative Justices, Dead At 93
O'Connor was the first female Supreme Court Justice
They say celebrity deaths happen in threes, largely because human beings always want to see patterns, as if patterns will somehow make sense of something as nonsensical as death. On Wednesday night, Henry Kissinger and Shane MacGowan died, and today, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor followed. Statistically, so did 150,000 other people around the world, but those people are not celebrities and thus not a factor in this. I don’t make the rules.
Sandra Day O’Connor was the first female Supreme Court justice, appointed by Ronald Reagan, fulfilling his campaign promise to do just that (as if anyone who voted for him would have cared either way). As such, she was a Republican, and mostly conservative — though something of a swing vote, especially in later years as the court drifted increasingly to the Right.
O’Connor passed away on Friday at the age of 93 — the cause cited as complications of dementia, which is also what led to her retreat from public life several years ago.
In addition to being the first female Supreme Court Justice, O’Connor was also the first woman to serve as a state legislature majority leader in any state. She was recommended to the position by Chief William Rehnquist, who actually had proposed to her when they briefly dated at Stanford Law.
Of course, when she first started in law, she couldn’t get a job at a law firm except as a secretary, despite having finished near the top of her class at Stanford.
In her first months as a Supreme Court justice, O’Connor received more than 60,000 letters, the most of any judge in history. Many of them from those who were supportive, but others came from men who were angry that a woman was appointed and still others came from men … sending naked pictures of themselves.
O’Connor also had to deal with the fact that there was no women’s bathroom near the court chambers and there wouldn’t be until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed in 1993.
Unlike the more staunch conservatives on the bench, O’Connor was an occasional swing vote and was willing to be moved and change her ideas as new information and evidence became available to her. Rather than being a “strict originalist” and claiming to interpret the law only as she believed it was specifically intended by those who wrote it hundreds of years ago, she took social advances into the equation.
“Rare indeed is the legal victory — in court or legislature — that is not a careful byproduct of an emerging social consensus,” she was quoted as saying.
In positives, she prevented Roe v. Wade from being overturned years earlier, when she concurred with the conservative majority on Webster v. Reproductive Health Service, which allowed a Mississippi law barring the use of state funds, facilities, and employees for anything related to abortion — but voted against using the case to overturn Roe.
She also sometimes leaned to the left as far as church and state issues were concerned, notably in McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union, centered on a display of the Ten Commandments being displayed in Kentucky courtrooms. O’Connor felt that religious plurality had worked better for the United States than theocracy had for other nations, asking “Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”
O’Connor also joined the majority on some pretty terrible decisions, most notably Bush v. Gore, when the Court determined that continuing to count the votes would, as Scalia wrote “threaten irreparable harm to petitioner Bush, and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election.” She voted to deem the Gun-Free School Zones Act unconstitutional, which has clearly worked out very well for everyone.
Perhaps most egregiously, she wrote the majority opinion in Lockyer v. Andrade, finding that sentencing someone to 50 years to life in prison for shoplifting five children’s videotapes from two different Kmarts (under California’s three strikes law — Leandro Andrade had previously been charged with non-violent drug and theft-related offenses) was somehow not cruel and unusual punishment. Leandro Andrade, for the record, is still in prison and will remain there until 2046, when he is 87 years old.
It would be a whole lot easier to do the gracious “Oh, we believed different things but she was the first woman Supreme Court justice and had some good opinions here and there!” thing here if it were not for that one. That … that was really bad.
She was, however, certainly preferable to Samuel Alito, who replaced her on the bench after she retired in 2006. O’Connor, at the time, worried that the reason she was not replaced by another woman had something to do with her performance as a judge and not George W. Bush being George W. Bush.
“I've often said, it’s wonderful to be the first to do something but I didn't want to be the last. If I didn’t do a good job, it might’ve been the last and indeed when I retired, I was not replaced, then, by a woman which gives one pause to think ‘Oh, what did I do wrong that led to this.’”
It’s fun being a woman, isn’t it? O’Connor would later lament the rightward shift of the court that resulted in many of her majority opinions being “dismantled.” And not any of the ones that should have been.
In conclusion, best to her friends and family and those grieving her, and but also it would be really great if we could get Leandro Andrade out of prison now, please.
She may have been a trailblazer for women, but she was also a trailblazer that paved the way for trump to take over the Republican party. Unforgivable.
Sandra Day O'Connor has earned her place in history. And has earned the judgment of history. That's everything civilized and measured I've got to say.