Sandra Day O Conner

Sandra O'Connor

Sandra Day was born on March 26, 1930 in El Paso, Texas to Harry and Ada Mae, owners of the Lazy-B-Cattle ranch in Southeastern Arizona, where Sandra grew up (United States Supreme Court 2003) as an only child until she was eight. In those early years, her family lived in isolation and with strained resources. The ranch did not have electricity and running water until she was seven years old and their nearest neighbors lived 25 miles away. Her loneliness forced her to make friends with the ranch's cowboys and pets. She read vigorously, learned to drive at seven, could fire rifles and rode horses well. Because the hardiness of the ranch prevented her from attaining a formal education, her parents sent Sandra to her maternal grandmother in El Paso (U.S. Supreme Court). Her grandmother was Mamie Scott Wilkey.

She went to the Radford School for girls from kindergarten to high school. But she grew so homesick that she stopped and returned to Arizona after a year. Despite the adjustment, Sandra obtained good marks at 16. She gives the credit of her accomplishment to her grandmother's confidence in her capability as her motivation and driving force in not admitting defeat (U.S. Supreme Court).

She later took up a course with a major on economics at Stanford University with the intention of using that knowledge in operating a ranch of her own or the Lazy-B ranch itself. When her family encountered a dispute over the ranch, she began to have an interest in law and enrolled at the Stanford Law School after finishing baccalaureate degree in economics, magna cum laude, in 1950. Instead of the traditional three years, she took only two to finish law and then served as editor of the Stanford Law Review until she became a member of the Order of the Coif, a legal honor society (U.S. Supreme Court). She met John O'Connor at this time, who was then also attending law school. Sandra graduated from law school in 1952, again with honors as third in a class of 102. The first placer was William H. Rehnquist, who was to be the Chief Justice. Then she and John were married.

II. No law firm wanted to take Sandra in, except one, which accepted her as a legal secretary (Hedding 2004). But the senior partner of this firm, William French Smith, was destined to help Sandra's nomination years later to the Supreme Court as the Attorney General. Disappointed over scanty prospects, Sandra took on a public service position as deputy county attorney for San Mateo, California (Hedding). When John graduated a year later from Stanford University, he was drafted into the Judge Advocate General Corps and served in Frankfurt, Germany for three years. Sandra joined him in Germany as a civilian lawyer in the Quartermaster's Corps.

In 1957, they decided to return to the U.S. And settle in Phoenix, Arizona, where their three sons were born that year, in 1960 and 1962. Despite her excellent academic records, she found it difficult to find a job as a lawyer, as did other women (Hedding) at that time. She could not land a position with a law firm, so she decided to start her own firm with a single partner. She worked on many small cases because she then lacked specialization as well as an established reputation. She then withdrew temporarily to care for her sons and got involved in volunteer activities with the Arizona State Hospital, the Arizona State Bar, the Salvation Army and local schools, as well as the Arizona Republic Party.

Five years later, she resumed work as an assistant state attorney general in Arizona. When a state senator vacated a seat for an appointment in Washington DC, Arizona Governor Jack Williams appointed Sandra to that vacancy in 1969. She occupied the position and successfully carried out her functions and, afterwards, defended to retain it for two more terms of two years each. Then, she became the majority leader - the first for any woman in the U.S. (Hedding). In 1974, she decided to run for judgeship on the Maricopa County Superior Court and declined the urging of state Republican leaders for her to run for governor in 1978, instead. She was elected to the Maricopa County Superior Court. A year later, the newly elected Democratic Governor Bruce Babbitt nominated her to the Arizona Court of Appeals and, in less than two years, President Ronald Reagan nominated her as the first woman in the Supreme Court and to replace the then retiring Justice Potter Stewart (Hedding). President Reagan wanted to fulfill his commitment to place or include women in high places of authority and importance. Sandra, an unknown, impressed him, although she spent most of her life in the West and never served in the federal judiciary.

Conservative groups were not too happy about this appointment. They remembered Sandra's moderate position on the abortion issue in the past. In the hearing for her appointment, Sandra was not coerced into revealing how she would vote if a repeal of the abortion law were put before her nor into speculating on any other issue (Hedding). The Judiciary Committee voted 17 to 1 and the Senate voted 99 to 0 in confirming her new post in the Tribunal. In anticipation, the Court changed its use of the formal and traditional address, "Mr. Justice," to the simpler and gender-neutral "Justice."

III. Her first major case was in 1982 about sex discrimination and she decided that a student could not be rejected from a nursing school because of his gender. But the Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services case of 1989 drew more attention to her. The case was to restrict access to abortions in certain cases and Sandra's was the deciding vote, which was 5 to 4 in favor of giving states the right to make specific abortion decisions (Hedding). The Conservatives hoped that her vote would weigh down restrict abortion practices and lead to the repeal of the Rose vs. Wade decision. But Sandra did not give in to their hopes.

In her early years in the Tribunal, observers held that Sandra was part of the Court's conservative faction, specifically through her association with Rehnquist, who shared her roots and values (U.S. Supreme Court). In her next few terms, however, Sandra proved that she had her own unique position in the Court. Although she appeared to commonly side with conservatives, she also frequently concurred to narrow down the scope of the majority's opinion.

Conservatives criticized her lack of federal judicial experience and constitutional knowledge (U.S. Supreme Court). They saw her nomination as a waste and were ever suspicious of her position on abortion. But the Liberals rejoiced at having a woman in the High Court, although they were displeased with her lack of sympathy for feminist causes. Eventually, Sandra came up with her own response to all the criticisms in the form of her own brand of pragmatic and centrist-oriented conservatism, which even the Liberals, who once called her a traitor in her early terms because of her compromise with abortion, began to appreciate her efforts to maintain the pro-choice slant of the Roe vs. Wade decision. Sandra was thereafter seen as resorting to practical solutions with the tendency to moderate and enhance her importance in an often-unstable and splintered Tribunal (U.S. Supreme Court).

Nancy Maveety's book, "Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: Strategist on the Supreme Court," tries to derive and offer a valid explanation for the voting and writing choices Sandra made and to reveal her strategic role in forming coalitions and shaping Court doctrines (Cook 1997). Sandra was only a seat away from the senior justice position and Maveety believes that she should take that risk of analyzing the jurisprudence of sitting justices. In the process, she encountered a rigid and formal jurisprudence and stubborn ideological dispositions faced by those who earlier explored this field. The author and other scholars who studied Sandra's court behavior agreed that her gender identity was not related or behind her strict rejection of feminist psychologists' and jurisprudents' idea of a "different voice (Cook)." Not even her state-level political experience proved to be the foundation for her jurisprudential theory or style, rather that it was precisely her broken career that provided the basis for her un-theoretical, nonconformist and pragmatic jurisprudence approach. In comparison, her fellow sitting justices, like Robert Sickels and John Paul Stevens were more predictable and more easily discerned, because they followed the required and familiar route to the bench. Sandra could only zigzag through and take full advantage of the limited opportunities that presented themselves to her as a married woman with children. Author Maveety saw Sandra as adapting to new life situations and taking on new roles and, in that process, worked out compromises according to the demands on her time and capabilities (Cook).

In her marriage, Sandra balanced and played out a unique complement f conventional and liberated female roles. She verbalized this balance in her hearings, during which she emphasized the utter value she placed on marriage and family. One could only observe and assume how her personal and professional lives were in constant adjustment, along with the constant and continuous changes of the rules, and this alchemy made up her jurisprudence mold (Cook).

In her entire career, Sandra exuded coldness and a lack of humor (Hedding). She was viewed as the great and consummate compromiser, whose chief aim was to simply achieve the majority vote. She was conservative and tough, but not too tough or conservative concerning women's and children's rights. She made it quite clear that the Constitutional role of a justice was to interpret the law, not to legislate, that is, make a new one.

As a pragmatist, Sandra normally began reviewing a case by first inductively discovering the decisional principles through reading selected opinions and internal memos covering a full range of issues. From there, she would proceed deductively by applying the principles to her initial opinions in three specific issue areas (Cook). Among her inputs for study were data from Thurgood Marshall, which Sandra used to develop concepts. The justices then exchanged conference memos. These memos demonstrated that Sandra's effort to promote her own theory was often seriously considered, but ultimately rejected by the other justices. These memos also showed that, despite the rejection, Sandra remained obstinate and pressed for her position. She also protected her position vigorously and rewrote her opinions to respond to the criticisms prepared by other justices for publication (Cook).

Maveety wrote that Sandra, however, exercised some flexibility towards issues to which she had as yet no answers, so that she could have the freedom to change her vote after conferring or considering other authoritative writings. She took recourse upon private papers she found in the Library of Congress with which to enrich her work and support her claim. Maveety saw two types of accommodation Sandra resorted to: jurisprudential and behavioral. When she balanced her arguments, preferred to retain but refashion precedents, used case facts to narrow down rulings, and showed or expressed aversion to bright-line rules, she was accommodating jurisprudentially. But when she wrote a separate opinion, limited her agreement with the right and left bloc positions or preferred to exert influence from within the majority, she was doing it behaviorally (Cook). Maveety considered Sandra's accommodation-ism as constituting a jurisprudence in itself, that led Maveety to employ her tradition method of analysis, which in turn, points to Sandra's flexible and capable use of precedent and balancing that get on the way of getting translated into variables needed for statistical models and interpretations. It must be noted, as Maveety failed to, that Sandra's jurisprudence did not utilize the tools of finding law, for example, intent or plain meaning (Cook). Her flexibility in decision-making in combination with a disinterest in legal foundations gave her the freedom to concentrate on the application of the law to specific case facts and its consequences for specific individuals. This style, though, antagonized her colleagues for whom the identification of legal foundations were the utmost and overriding consideration (Cook).

Author Maveety could find no specific values in Sandra's background on which to ground her court behavior, except her partisan activities that indicate her sympathy with conservative policy outcomes. Neither did she find any basis for Sandra's conventional behavioral mode. Even when a case's issues involve conflicting values of equal importance, a justice must draw a fairy dichotomous dispositional opinion, regardless of the hardness or pliability of the legal test (Cook).

Maveety's description of behavioral accommodation appeared to be weaker than that of jurisprudential accommodation, when specifically applied to Sandra's practice. Sandra both voted for the majority disposition and wrote a concurring opinion, and in Maveety's view, it was difficult to distinguish sincere from strategic majority votes. Sometimes, Sandra would make tentative or change her vote, before agreeing with the majority, could expand her options and, for whatever internal purposes or motives, she could induce another justice into revising the draft (Cook). Nonetheless, memos that reflected a delay in joining Court opinion or a dissent were not unsettling for Sandra but merely routine tactics of influence. Some statistics could show how Sandra compared with other justice in what is called "strategic fluidity."

Maveety interpreted Sandra's concurrence mode as "a rational strategy for judicial actors seeking to influence the future formation and composition of winning opinion coalitions (qtd in Cook). But it should be noted that she was doing it alone: Brennan, White, Powell, Kennedy, Scalia and Stevens formed more concurring opinions, too, and they did not observe Sandra's jurisprudential slant. One may wonder if she differed in her strategic behaviors from her conservative colleagues, who could have also wanted to emphasize their doctrine on the majority. To this, Maveety responded that the forming or writing of separate opinions might constitute and be treated as a kind of leadership, rather than an accommodationist strategy (Cook).

Sandra appeared disinclined to accommodate the stiff doctrine of the right or the left, but insisted on her own standards in making decisions, particularly when the consequence of a plurality decision did not suggest (the need or urgency for) accommodation. Her doctrines may have been accommodating, but she was not exactly willing to take in bright-line rules in the same way that her colleagues were unwilling to give in to her standards of flexibility (Cook).

The author veered a bit from Sandra's accommodationist style in case problems. She turned to Sandra's most important contribution to the collective output, or precedential decisions, of the Supreme Court. Her colleagues and her community were not in a hurry to acknowledge her ability and ambition. Sandra's life story, however, vastly and clearly reveals her work ethic, organizational and analytical skills, efficiency, concentration and persistence, developed in community service and in state government as immediately available to her bid for Court leadership (Cook), which she eventually gained when she became the first female Chief Justice. The author illustrated this reality in Sandra's proposed doctrinal language for abortion, religion, and race cases, and in the formulation of successive special opinions, and, most importantly, in successfully gaining a majority or plurality vote to incorporate these, whether openly or covertly, into case law. One can infer that her successes may be the outcome of the minority status of ideological extremists.

The values and issues that ensued from Sandra's economic cases could serve as more severe test of her principles and strategies. The outcome or consequences of her economic and criminal jurisprudence, on the other hand, could speak of the significance of her political experience in state administration, such as at the attorney-general's office, and in the state judiciary, such as in the trial and appellate courts (Cook). The author could not and did not establish any firm federalism principle in Sandra's vote for abortion, church-state, race and death penalty opinions. It was simply that her accommodationist jurisprudence was different and "revolutionary (qtd in Cook)." She points to only one justice with a similar common-sense approach that was Harlan, indicating her having served in a historical court.

Maveety utilized two conflicting origins of modern thought, i.e., 16th century humanism and 17th century rationalism in striving to decode Sandra. While the humanist dealt more on the nature and circumstances of a particular civil or criminal action, the rationalist gave more weight to drawing or developing rules and dealt with the issues independently. These two thinkers directly opposed each other: local vs. universal, timely vs. timeless, the concrete vs. The abstract and the clear vs. The confusing. Sandra took account of the problem itself and the situation, while respecting the details and so could have been catalogued as a humanist (Cook). The two moral philosophies withheld support for the modern psychological theory that aligned masculinity with formal rule-bound morality and femininity, with flexible context-responsive morality (Cook). Neither was gender-based for four centuries. Sandra constantly denied that gender influenced her decision-making not only had strong historical foundation, but also put her in a single class, unless and until later research discovers an earlier genre among the Renaissance or Greeks (Cook).

In March 2000, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced that the U.S. would make its own decisions and go its own way concerning executions, especially of those convicts under 18 (UPI 2000). She made this announcement during the Conference on Democracy and the Rule of Law in a Changing World Order at the Library of Congress in Washington DC and before an audience, consisting of jurists and academics from the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America.

Despite the pronouncement, she complemented international law in general. She noted the interest of the international community in vindicating the normal of an "international society" by prosecuting and punishing transgressors of the basic standards of human behavior (UPI)." But she said that the principle that applied to South Africa was more complicated, even broken down, sometimes, in states in transition from an authoritarian to a democratic one. She expressed belief that a new democratic regime should balance the need to prosecute and punish offenders and the need to nurture the weak and just-emerging democracy by foregoing punishment. She also praised existing international tribunals that tried war crimes and hostilities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

She noted how the international community had criticized the U.S. For retaining the death penalty, and particularly, its application to convicts 18 years old and less (at the time of the commission of the offense), as inconsistent with evolving international positions. She first agreed that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966, banned the death penalty for those 18 years or less at the time of the commission of the offense and for pregnant women (UPI). But she stressed that the U.S. Senate ratified the Covenant in 1992 with two exceptions: that it reserved the right of the U.S. To execute those convicted of capital crimes, excluding pregnant women, but including those convicted of such crimes at the time of the commission of the offense. At the time of the ratification by the Senate, Sandra said that the U.S. saw itself bound by the Covenant's ban on "cruel, inhuman or degrading" punishments only insofar as such punishment is (was so) interpreted by the U.S. Constitution (UPI). The ultimate interpreter of the U.S. Constitution is the Supreme Court.

She clarified how the U.S. viewed cruel and unusual punishment. She made reference to a 1989 Supreme Court decision, Stanford vs. Kentucky, wherein the Tribunal ruled that imposing capital punishment upon those only 16 or 17 at the time of the commission of the offense within the meaning and purview of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Sandra concurred with that 1989 verdict but wrote a separate opinion as a minor part of the verdict. She said that the Supreme Court emphasized in its ruling opinion that it is/was "American conceptions of decency" that were the deciding factors of the said case (UPI).

She emphatically said that, while international practices and norms might be at least relevant in evaluating evolving standards of decency in some cases, the U.S. Supreme Court's approach to domestic criminal law, the national sovereignty interests carried more weight in the balance that did international norms.

But in October 2003, Sandra predicted that the U.S. Supreme Court had increasingly based its decisions on international law, rather than the U.S. Constitution, according to an article published at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The article quoted Sandra as saying that, by doing so, the U.S. would make a good impression among people from other countries (Pierce 2003) and that she regarded good impressions as important and could leave the mark of the U.S., especially concerning the treatment of foreign and international law and the U.S. Supreme Court.