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O'CONNOR, SANDRA DAY 1930-

SUPREME COURT JUSTICE

Fate Can Be a Strange Thing

Attorney Sandra Day O'Connor, third in her law school class of 102 students, graduated in 1952 from Stanford Law School. That year, as law firm after law firm turned her down since she was a woman, she was finally offered a position as a legal secretary at a firm where a lawyer named William French Smith was a partner. She turned it down. Nearly thirty years later, U.S. Attorney General William French Smith had a hand in recommending her appointment as the first female Supreme Court justice.

A Solid Beginning

Sandra Day was born on 26 March 1930 in El Paso, Texas. Her parents, Harry Day and Ada Mae Wilkey Day, owned a ranch comprising nearly two hundred thousand acres of land on which they raised two thousand cattle. Their home was a simple four-room building made of adobe that did not even have running water until 1937. Sandra learned to be independent early as she was an only child on a remote ranch until the births of her sister, Ann, and brother, Alan, in 1938 and 1939, respectively. She reportedly spent much of her time reading and having her mother read to her from sources such as the Saturday Evening Post and the Wall Street Journal When she was five years old, she began living with her maternal grandmother, Mamie Wilkey in El Paso. While school was in session, she attended a private school for most of the next eleven years until graduating from high school at age sixteen. She went on to Stanford University and earned a magna cum laude degree in economics in 1950. Later, while studying at the Stanford Law School, she was inducted into the Order of the Coif and served as a member of the Stanford Law Review.

Career Years

Rather than accept a position as a legal secretary, Day went to work as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California. The same year that she graduated from Stanford Law School, she married John O'Connor III. When her husband graduated from law school in 1953, he joined the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General Corps and served in Germany for three years. During that time, Sandra Day O'Connor worked as a civilian attorney for the army's quartermaster corps. Upon their return to the United States in 1957, the O'Connors moved to Maricopa County, Arizona. During the next six years they had three sons, and Sandra divided her time between being a full-time mother, going into partnership with another attorney for a short period, and engaging in volunteer work. From 1960 through 1965 she worked in a variety of activities ranging from writing some of the questions for the Arizona bar exam to serving as a member of the Maricopa County Board of Adjustment and Appeals. She also became increasingly involved in local Republican politics. She returned to work in 1965 as an assistant attorney general and in 1969 was appointed to fill an Arizona senate seat being vacated by the incumbent. She thereafter won reelection to two succesive terms and in 1972 was elected majority leader of the state senate, the first woman to hold such a position anywhere in the country.

The Call of the Judiciary

In 1974 O'Connor ran for and won an election as a judge on the Maricopa County Superior Court. Although Republican leaders urged her in 1978 to run for governor, she declined and continued to serve as a judge. In 1979 Bruce Babbitt, the Democratic governor, appointed her as a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals, where she worked on a wide range of legal matters for the next twenty-one months. On 19 August 1981 President Ronald Reagan nominated her to the U.S. Supreme Court seat being vacated by retiring Justice Potter Stewart. On 26 September 1981 the U.S. Senate confirmed her nomination by a vote of 99-0. Although initially thought to be a conservative vote on the court, Justice O'Connor has come to be regarded as more of a swing vote and has in fact voted with both the conservative and the liberal justices on various 5—4 margins during the years. No one, however, questions her commitment. In 1988 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, had surgery, and returned to the bench only ten days later, without missing any work.