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“Sandra Day O’Connor, a self-described ‘Arizona cowgirl’ who made history as the first woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, died on Friday in Phoenix, Arizona. She was 93…
“Nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, O’Connor served 24 years on the court before stepping down to take care of her husband, who also battled Alzheimer’s. During that time, she was the court’s key vote on a wide range of issues, including abortion, affirmative action, and religion. She was known less for an overarching judicial philosophy than for crafting opinions that were often narrow and practical.” SCOTUSblog
Both sides applaud O’Connor’s trailblazing career:
“Her approach was simple: Consider the question presented, assess the facts, apply the law and make a decision. She didn’t play philosopher-king but decided the cases before her… The use of traditional tools to reach the right legal conclusion was hardly revolutionary. And that was the point. She rejected the notion of a grand unified theory of constitutional law and instead practiced a kind of judicial humility that respected the institutions of government…
“That is why she became a video-game mogul after retiring from the court. Sensing a decline in civic literacy as school curriculums abandoned the topic, she dedicated herself to reinvigorating knowledge of constitutional structure and to sharing her love of American government with students. The result was iCivics, a digital platform providing interactive games and lesson plans designed to promote civic education and active citizenship… Sandra Day O’Connor wasn’t a crusader or a philosopher. She aspired to be a good judge and a loyal citizen. In succeeding, she has become a pioneer and a national treasure.”
Viet D. Dinh, Wall Street Journal
“Considered a minimalist, she worked to devise opinions that decided the case and usually little more. She was sometimes criticized for that approach. Justice Antonin Scalia made no secret of his frustration. When she refused to overturn Roe v. Wade, in the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he snarlingly referred to the opinion as a ‘jurisprudence of confusion.’ She was criticized by many academics for failing to articulate a grand vision of the law. What they missed was that this was her grand vision of the law — or at least of the Supreme Court…
“She believed that the most important decisions about how to govern the country belonged to the political branches and to state legislatures, not to a court sitting in Washington. Seeing the law through her eyes during the year I worked for her, I realized that she was not looking for a sweeping theory that would change the face of the law. She wanted to decide the case before her and provide a bit of guidance to the lower courts as necessary but leave the rest to the democratic process.”
Oona A. Hathaway, New York Times
Other opinions below.
“Raised on her family’s Arizona ranch, O’Connor served in the state Legislature before she became a judge. She brought to the Court a Western sensibility and a respect for the prerogatives of the states that had fallen into disfavor amid the assertion of progressive federal power in the 20th century…
“Along with Chief Justice William Rehnquist, her classmate at Stanford Law School, she sought to put limits on federal intrusions on state power. She provided the fifth vote for the majority in U.S. v. Lopez (1995), which struck down a federal ban on carrying a gun in a school zone. The majority ruled that Congress had exceeded its power to regulate under the Commerce Clause. The Lopez line of cases has restored some balance to constitutional federalism that was much needed, and still is.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“From the Court’s founding in 1789 until O’Connor’s retirement in 2005, there was always at least one justice who had been an elected official, especially in the chief justiceship. William Howard Taft had been the president, John Jay had served as president of the Continental Congress, and Charles Evans Hughes had narrowly lost a presidential election. Salmon P. Chase and Earl Warren were serious presidential candidates…
“Understanding that O’Connor was a politician as much as a judge makes her decisions easier to understand: She fundamentally saw her role more in terms of moderation, justice, fairness, and consensus rather than the crisp clarity of textual fidelity. That is not to denigrate her abilities as a lawyer…
“But her tendency to bring the habits of a politician into her legal decisionmaking is why her approach to judging has gone out of fashion, and rightly so. In that sense, her career, distinguished as it was, marks the last stop on a road no longer taken.”
Dan McLaughlin, National Review
“With her guidance, the Supreme Court weighed carefully the impact its rulings would have on Americans. In oral arguments, she would often ask how a hypothetical ruling might affect real people and institutions. She was far from being an abortion rights activist, yet she provided the key vote to uphold the core elements of Roe v. Wade in the landmark 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling, explaining in a co-written principal opinion that a generation of women had come of age relying on the constitutional right to abortion…
“Similarly, in 2003, she wrote the majority opinion upholding university affirmative action in Grutter v. Bollinger, declaring that affirmative action’s ‘benefits are not theoretical but real,’ even as she said the ‘Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.’ Grutter reflected Justice O’Connor’s empathy for those who, like her, faced social obstacles based on characteristics such as race, gender or sexual orientation.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“By the 2000s, O’Connor had grown into a truly independent jurist—with one glaring, tragic exception that would fatally undermine her impact on the law: After the contested 2000 election, she voted with her fellow conservatives to halt the Florida recount and award the election to George W. Bush…
“In 2005, O’Connor chose to step down so she could care for her husband, who had Alzheimer’s disease. She did so at the peak of her power and influence, in part because the chief justice, William Rehnquist, insisted that she retire so that he could stay on the court another year. He died shortly thereafter. Her premature retirement allowed Bush—the president she installed in 2000—to replace her with Samuel Alito, a substitution that registered as a rebuke to everything O’Connor stood for.”
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
A libertarian's take
“In a series of rulings in the 1990s and early 2000s, O'Connor was a crucial figure in the Rehnquist Court's ‘federalism revolution,’ which did much to revive judicial enforcement of structural limits on federal government power, after a long period when judicial review in this field was extremely weak…
“Fittingly, in her last year on the Court—2005—O'Connor wrote forceful dissents in Gonzales v. Raich—(a terrible federalism decision holding that Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce authorizes a ban on the possession of marijuana that never crossed state lines or was sold in any commercial transaction)—and Kelo v. City of New London (a terrible property rights ruling in which a narrow 5-4 majority held that private ‘economic development’ qualifies as a ‘public use’ allowing the use of eminent domain)…
“O'Connor's compelling dissent in Kelo helped break the seeming consensus in favor of a very broad definition of ‘public use’ and played an important role in generating the powerful reaction against the Court's decision by state courts and legislatures.”
Ilya Somin, Volokh Conspiracy
