After graduating in 1952, Sandra Day O’Connor couldn’t find a law firm willing to give her a job. Nearly 30 years later, she was the first woman appointed to the US Supreme Court, a historic milestone for women’s rights. IBA Global Insight speaks to the former Supreme Court Justice who was at the centre of the controversial election of George W Bush.

Sandra Day O’Connor, sitting serenely on  a pristine cream sofa in her Savoy suite  overlooking London’s River Thames, was  just a child when she shot her first coyote. It  was a tough job, she says, but somebody had  to do it. ‘We kept a rifle in the truck wherever  we went and if we saw a coyote, I’d shoot out of  the window. You were bouncing along so it was  hard to do, but we needed to kill them to sto p them eating our small calves.’

O’Connor has a steely twinkle in her eye as  she speaks, and it is clear she enjoys recounting  this tale of early grit and chutzpah. These  qualities have, after all, defined the 81-year-old  through much of her life and career, as  she rose from unemployed law graduate to  one of the most powerful women in American  history, as the first woman appointed to the  US Supreme Court. In 2000, O’Connor made  another indelible mark on history, playing a seminal role in arguably the most controversial  Supreme Court decision when it resolved the  contested Bush v Gore election. 

O’Connor’s rise to the top tier of the  American judiciary came almost exactly  30 years ago, on 7 July 1981, by which time  O’Connor had already served as an assistant  attorney general, a state senator and an appeals  judge for Arizona. Not a bad résumé. And all  the more impressive considering the only job she was offered following graduation from  Stanford Law School was as a legal secretary. At  the time, Tupperware parties and I Love Lucy  – a sitcom featuring a stereotypically feeble  woman, reliant on her husband – were the  epitome of female entertainment.

O’Connor’s unusual upbringing on an  isolated ranch on the border of Arizona and  New Mexico clearly played a key role in her  later life and career.  Here she learnt how  to ‘get on and work  hard’, adopting those  invaluable all-American  traits of mettle, drive  and self-sufficiency.  ‘You never knew from  day to day what you’d  have to do. In a place  like that you have to  fix everything to make  it work. If we had to  build a fence, we built  it. If you had to repair  your car, you repaired  it. There was no one to call.’

The oldest child of three, O’Connor took  on much of the responsibility for running  the ranch, planning one day to take it over  from her parents, just as her father had taken  it over from his.

Yet unlike her father, whose  aspirations to study at Stanford University fell  by the wayside, O’Connor left home to live with  her grandmother and attend school in El Paso  – and, eventually, earned the Stanford place  her father had coveted.  It was here, during her undergraduate  studies, that O’Connor met the ‘inspirational’  professor Harry Rathbun, who convinced her  to stay on and take a graduate law degree. It  is also here that she first encountered William  Rehnquist, who went on to become Supreme  Court chief justice in 1986.

She and ‘Bill’  quickly became friends, then more than  friends, as they bonded over regular games of  bridge and charades at O’Connor’s house: a  co-op established by the widow of the former  head of the education department for the  small handful of graduate women who had  nowhere else to live. 

In 1952, O’Connor graduated near the top  of her class, got married – not to Bill, but John  Jay, a colleague on the Stanford Law Review  – and excitedly entered the outside world.  But the world wasn’t ready for an ambitious,  intelligent woman who could hold her own  in conversation and shoot a jackrabbit at 50  yards.

‘No one gave me a job,’ she says. ‘It was very frustrating because I had done very well  in both undergraduate and law school and my  male classmates weren’t having any problems.  No one would even speak to me.’ 

Exhibiting the persistence and initiative  for which she would later become renowned,  O’Connor sought out a county attorney in San  Mateo, California, who she heard had once had  a woman on his staff, and agreed to work for nothing until he could pay her a salary.

Four  months later she was made a full employee,  only leaving, reluctantly, after her husband was  drafted to the Judge  Advocate General’s  Corps in Frankfurt,  Germany, during the  Korean War. 

From law to legislature 

When the couple returned home to Arizona in 1957, O’Connor again struggled to find work, and again used her tenacity to get herself out of trouble by convincing another man to open a law office with her. The two primarily took on cases for people with limited funds and evidently earned a good reputation doing so, as O’Connor was soon elected a precinct committeeman by the Republican Party, and subsequently appointed to a vacancy in the Arizona State Senate.

Here she was re-elected twice, and in 1973, to her ‘great shock’, she was made majority leader. Her surprise was perhaps understandable: it was the first time a woman in the US had ever held a legislative leadership position. For Sandy D’Alemberte, former president of the American Bar Association, who knew O’Connor through her service as a board member of the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative (CEELI), this tenure in the US legislature provided the justice with invaluable training for her elevation to the Supreme Court.

‘She had a great ability to make people feel comfortable around her, to relate to people, and she always showed great hospitality for the people who came from other countries to visit the US,’ he says. ‘I think a lot of this came from her political senses.’ Mark Ellis, executive director of the IBA, who also worked with O’Connor at CEELI, has similar sentiments. ‘She had an incredible ability to connect with people, which she used throughout her political and judicial career. You could tell people had this tremendous admiration and respect for her.’

O’Connor eventually returned to the law in 1975 as an elected county judge, and in 1979 was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals. Then, two years later, she suffered her next ‘great shock’ – when President Ronald Reagan announced he was nominating her to the US Supreme Court, following a campaign pledge to help secure the female vote.

‘I had never worked at court, I had never been a law clerk there, I had never tried a case at court,’ says O’Connor. ‘It was far removed from our life in Arizona and I was not trying to move to Washington DC. I was not sure if I went to the Supreme Court that it would be a comfortable choice for me.’ But with support from her husband (‘come on, you’ll be fine’), O’Connor accepted the post, and consequently carved out her own unique foothold in the history of her country. Elected to the Court by a sweeping Senate majority of 99-0 (the missing senator, Max Baucus of Montana, sent her a copy of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It as an apology for his absence), she was clearly a popular choice – even if it was due in large part to Reagan’s popularity at the time.

The process, however, was far from painless. ‘I was on national television every minute of every day,’ she recalls. ‘It was very stressful. I think I’d still be there except the wife of the committee chairman decided to have a big tea and invited everybody who was anybody in Washington to go.’

‘Open and practical’

Accompanying O’Connor on the Bench were Republican nominees Rehnquist, William Brennan, Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell and John Paul Stevens, and Democratic nominees Thurgood Marshall and Byron White. Powell was O’Connor’s favourite, a ‘wonderful man’ willing to do ‘anything’ she needed, whereas White – a former football halfback – had such a powerful handshake that she was forced to grab his thumb with her fist as a pre-emptive measure to prevent serious injury. Brennan, Blackmun, Powell and Marshall were gone within the decade, replaced by Republican nominees Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter and Clarence Thomas, leaving White the sole ‘Democratic’ voice before President Bill Clinton’s appointments of Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer in 1993 and 1994 respectively.

Liberals were crying out for moderation, and in O’Connor, it seems, they got what they were asking for. ‘She didn’t seem to have an overarching ideology,’ says Joel Grossman, professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and expert in US constitutional law. ‘She was more conservative than not, but pragmatic really describes her. She tended to look at each case as a problem to be solved.’

‘She was never doctrinaire,’ adds D’Alemberte. ‘She was the kind of conservative even we liberals could admire. She was always open and practical, and analysed things from some understanding of how things play out among people.’

Playing politics

Yet O’Connor’s reputation as a moderate is not to underplay her essential conservatism. For the first few years, her voting record aligned heavily with Rehnquist, and between 1994 and 2004 she only joined the liberal wing of Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg and Souter in just over a quarter of all controversial 5-4 decisions. Indeed, perhaps the most contentious Supreme Court decision of all time was that of Bush v Gore in 2000, in which O’Connor played a seminal role. Voting with the 5-4 majority, O’Connor ruled that the Florida Supreme Court’s method for recounting ballots was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and, crucially, that no alternative method could be established within the time limits set by the state.

The decision gave Bush the electoral votes he needed to win the state and, consequently, the presidency.

The decision was especially contentious for O’Connor, whose husband reportedly announced to three witnesses at an election night party that she wished to retire under a Republican president. Critics leapt on this as evidence of her political partisanship and O’Connor remains prickly about the issue now. ‘Look, you have volunteers working in the polls,’ she says, showing her first sign of restlessness since the interview began.

‘They have to count them and they get a ballot where the chad isn’t punched out. Are you going to have the same rule or just let them do anything they want? Come on. It’s a federal election and you need a federal policy and you need to be able to inform the volunteers who are counting the ballots. And Florida didn’t do that.’

So what about the comments blaming her decision on her plans for retirement? ‘For heaven’s sake, I don’t care.’

And did the comments have any weight? ‘They were ill informed. You will always have ill-informed comments.’

Yet despite her protestations, even O’Connor’s staunchest supporters have difficulty understanding the decision. ‘It was once of the worst judgments the Court has ever made,’ says D’Alemberte. ‘It is extraordinary when you read that opinion. The Court itself announced that it cannot be used as precedent in other cases, which is almost a concession they have jumped off the rails. I can’t explain why she joined that decision.’

For those outside the US, the Supreme Court’s essentially partisan nature is sometimes difficult to comprehend. The idea of a committed Republican ruling on a highly politicised issue such as the election of a president seems questionable at best, unethical at worst. Yet it is a system that has endured for 222 years and looks unlikely to change in the near future.

O’Connor, certainly, believes there is no need for a new one. ‘I think the system’s been remarkably effective: do you have a better one to propose?’ she asks pointedly. I confess that I don’t, but ask if she might. ‘No, I wouldn’t think you would. It’s worked pretty well.’

Moderation in excess

It is perhaps testament to O’Connor’s popularity and pragmatism that the 2000 presidential election has not marred her legacy among more liberal-minded folk as some at first believed it would. A number of other decisions seem to have mitigated the damage, including Grutter v Bollinger, which upheld affirmative action, and Webster v Reproductive Health Services, in which O’Connor refused, to Scalia’s rage, to overturn Roe v Wade. She was also the deciding vote in several significant gender equality cases, including Price Waterhouse v Hopkins and Jackson v Birmingham Board of Education. O’Connor’s opinion on abortion is perhaps indicative of her lack of judicial activism: she admits she finds abortion ‘repugnant’, yet has felt unable, legally, to undermine it. ‘You’re not going to decide some case based on your own fundamental values, which are different from everyone else’s,’ she says. ‘That’s not going to happen.’

Interestingly, considering her legacy as a champion of women’s rights, O’Connor’s dismissal of value-judgments extends to her view of gender roles. Her appointment, she feels, was positive in the inspiration it provided for other women to escape a world of pinafores and petticoats; yet she does not feel that she, as a woman, brought anything fundamentally different to the Court and even resents the label ‘feminist’. ‘At the end of the day, you have to resolve something on legal principles and you’re not going to do something different just because you’re a man or a woman.’

Since stepping down in 2006, O’Connor’s absence on the Court has been mourned by many, who are discomforted by its ideological shift to the right. The retired justice herself at first refused to be drawn on the subject, but has since become more outspoken. ‘What would you feel?’ she said at a May 2009 panel discussion at the College of William and Mary, Virginia, where she is Chancellor, when asked how she felt about the Court’s retreat on some of her judgments on abortion rights and campaign finance.

‘I’d be a little bit disappointed. If you think you’ve been helpful and then it’s dismantled, you think: “Oh dear.” But life goes on. It’s not always positive.’

Enduring legacy

Life does, indeed, go on. Since leaving the Court in 2006 to care for her husband, who suffered from Alzheimer’s for many years and died in 2009, O’Connor has hardly been your conventional octogenarian grandmother.

Alongside raising awareness for Alzheimer’s research, she has led a campaign against the election of judges (‘I can’t imagine why we do it’) and denounced Republican attacks on judicial independence after a series of public criticisms of court decisions (‘It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings’).

After despairing that only a third of young people could name the three branches of government, O’Connor also set up an interactive website, www.ourcourts.org to be used in schools as a civic educational tool, which has since proved a great success. But despite all these achievements, will history remember the ranch-girl-made-good as anything other than a timely symbol of female emancipation? For many, the answer is yes; her flexible approach, they say, had greater impact on legal precedent than that of the more intransigent ideologues on the Supreme Court. Others, however, question whether she has quite made the cut. ‘The great justices are the ones who write the opinions that we teach in constitutional law, and, other than a few cases, hers were not quite at that level,’ says Grossman. ‘She left her mark, but it’s not a mark that will be remembered in 200 years.’

History, it is true, often has trouble remembering moderation, subtlety and restraint when faced with the more virile alternatives of passion, ambition and energetic zeal. Yet it is clear that O’Connor had all these things, lacking ideological ardour, but zealous in her pursuit of social justice and equality. Whether she herself wishes, or expects, to be remembered by posterity for her good works, she, with characteristic modesty, declines to say. But, she is clear on what she would like on her tombstone. ‘It was what I told Congress when they were interviewing me,’ she says. ‘“Here lies a good judge.”’