Is Sandra Day O’Connor, the First Woman to Serve on the Supreme Court, Dead at the Age of 93?
During a pivotal time in the history of American law, when issues such as abortion, affirmative action, sex discrimination, and voting rights were being debated, she was the most influential woman in the nation. Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court, passed away on Friday in Phoenix. She was the daughter of a rancher and held a seat in the middle of the ideological spectrum on the court, which allowed her to exert a tremendous deal of influence over the legal system in the United States.
Her age was 93. In a statement, the Supreme Court made the announcement of her passing, stating that the cause of death was complications related to dementia. The former justice, who had not been seen in public for some time, said in a letter that she had published to the public in October 2018, when she was 88 years old, that she had been diagnosed with the starting stages of dementia, “probably Alzheimer’s disease,” and that as a result, she was withdrawing from public life.
Despite the fact that her fellow classmate at Stanford Law School, William H. Rehnquist, served as chief justice for a significant portion of her term, the Supreme Court during that vital period was frequently referred to as the O’Connor court, and Justice O’Connor was rightly referred to as the most powerful woman in the United States.
There was very little that could take place without the support of Justice O’Connor when it came to the contentious issues that were on the court’s docket. The law concerning affirmative action, abortion, voting rights, religion, federalism, sex discrimination, and other controversial topics was basically what Sandra Day O’Connor believed it should be. Given the attentive attention that Justice O’Connor devoted to current events and the mood of the public, it was not a surprise that the middle ground she sought to find also happened to be the favorite position of the public.
According to what she stated in “The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice,” a compilation of her articles that was published in 2003, “Rare indeed is the legal victory — in court or legislature — that is not a careful byproduct of an emerging social consensus.” It was in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan appointed her to the Supreme Court in order to fulfill a campaign promise to select the first female justice. At the time, she was serving as a judge on a midlevel appeals court in Arizona, where she had been involved in Republican politics for a long time, despite the fact that she had connections in both parties.
At the time of her nomination, she was fifty-one years old. She had served for twenty-four years before taking early retirement in January 2006 in order to take care of her sick husband. However, in the end, her moderate conservatism made her appear to be a relative liberal. This occurred during the time period in which the court was moving to the right.
