In her memoirs, Sandra Day O’Connor described a young woman unlike any of her colleagues on the United States Supreme Court. There she was tossing calves, fixing trucks and doing homework on a vast ranch on the Arizona-New Mexico border owned by her parents.
He recalled in his book waking up one morning and “seeing a huge fireball in the distance” and “a dark cloud.” Only later did he know that he had witnessed the dawn of a new era. He had seen the test of the first atomic bomb in Alamogordo (New Mexico), on July 16, 1945.
That young woman grew up and was not a witness, but the protagonist of a new era, a pioneer in the demolition of one of those glass ceilings that make history. In September 1981, nominated by President Ronald Reagan, O’Connor became the first woman to become a judge on the US Supreme Court. She died this Friday at the age of 93.
“He died in Phoenix (Arizona) due to complications linked to his advanced dementia and probably Alzheimer’s, and a respiratory illness,” the institution reported in a statement. She served in the position for almost a quarter of a century, until she retired in 2006. She left abruptly, at age 75, to dedicate herself to caring for her husband, John O’Connor, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, with whom she He married in 1952. He breathed his last in 2009, at the age of 79.
Although she was elected as a conservative, she practiced free verse and often became the vote that broke the four-to-four tie. Sometimes she did it in favor of the conservative magistrates and other times, of the liberal ones, especially on civil rights issues.
One of its most notable tiebreakers occurred in 2000 when resolving the electoral recount conflict in Florida, which involved determining whether Al Gore (Democrat) or George W. Bush (Republican) would take the key to the White House. On that occasion he broke the tie and sided with the conservatives, giving the presidency to Bush.
After a few years, O’Connor regretted his decision and considered that the Supreme Court should not have gotten involved in the matter. He confessed this in an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 2013. “The ruling shocked citizens and gave the court a less than perfect reputation,” he said.
She was also criticized for announcing in 2005 that she planned to retire. O’Connor, who as a conservative joined the Supreme Court and maintained her opposition to abortion as “a birth control issue,” evolved in her ideas. So she voted in favor of maintaining the ruling that authorized the termination of pregnancy at the national level.
The anticipation of his departure allowed President Bush to choose as a substitute Samuel Alito, the far-right judge who in 2022 was the rapporteur of the ruling adopted by the conservative majority in which the federal right to abortion that had been protected was annulled. Since the Roe v. Wade.
During her term as judge, another woman joined the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020. Four others arrived after them, all four of them active today: Sonia Sotomayor (first Hispanic), Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackso, the first African American.
But O’Connor, who overcame breast cancer, experienced vertigo before anyone else. That which arises from observing how each and every one of his decisions were scrutinized and thoroughly reviewed for being the pioneer in an organization that had been only for men for 191 years.
Some time later he confessed that this attention became intimidating at times. “It’s exciting, in a way, to be the first to do something, the first woman to have served on the high court. But it’s terrible if you’re the last one. And if you don’t do the job right, that’s what happens.”
O’Connor, who retired from public life in 2018 after experiencing the initial symptoms of her illness, was the first but not the last.
