A Tribute to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor

Kathleen M. Sullivan*

For those of us who graduated from law school in 1981, the year that Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman Justice appointed to the Supreme Court, it was difficult to imagine the legal world she had faced upon her own graduation from Stanford Law School in 1952. While her classmate William H. Rehnquist headed off to a clerkship with Justice Robert Jackson, his future colleague on the Court scrambled for legal work despite her top grades and law review membership. Law firms would consider her for positions as a secre tary but not as a lawyer; she later recalled them asking, “Ms. Day, do you type?” Nothing in her experience then could have foretold that she would ascend to the high Court at all, much less become one of the most influential Justices in its history.

In the intervening three decades, Justice O’Connor exercised excep tional strength of character, responding to the overt professional sex discrimination she encountered with remarkable resilience and re sourcefulness. She talked her way into a job in a local prosecutor’s of fice. She served as a government procurement lawyer while her hus band John O’Connor was stationed in Germany in the JAG Corps. She opened a storefront law office in a shopping center when she and her husband settled back in Phoenix. While raising three sons, she mastered the art of political networking. She wasted no energy on self-pity. As one recent biographer noted, Justice O’Connor has followed a lifelong mantra that