Justice Stephen G. Breyer*

Sandra Day O’Connor was born in El Paso, Texas and raised in rural Arizona on a cattle ranch that her grandfather founded. She loved life on the “Lazy B,” where she learned to mend fences, ride horses, fire a rifle, and drive a truck – all by the age of eight. Her fa vorite pets included a bobcat named Bob, a horse named Chico, and a sparrow hawk named Sylvester. She left the ranch to enter Stanford University, where she attended both college and law school. Despite graduating third in her law school class, she had to deal with consider able gender-based discrimination on her way to becoming a lawyer, a legislator, and a judge. Given Sandra’s love of riding, fishing, and the outdoors, I have no doubt she would have made a great rancher. But luckily for all of us, she chose law and became a great Supreme Court Justice instead.

11 Id.at 718.
l2 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HENRY V act 5, SC. 2.
13 See Kimba M. Wood, A Tribute to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, 1996 N.Y.U. ANN. SURV. AM. L. xlviii, Ii.
* Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States.

Justice Byron White used to say that with each new appointment the Supreme Court is a different Court. I know only the most recent Court, the Court of the past eleven years. But that is time enough for me to understand the enormous benefit – for the Court, for its members, and for the law itself – of having Sandra Day O’Connor as a judicial colleague.

Justice O’Connor has brought to the Court’s work, among other

VOLUME 119 MARCH 2006 NUMBERS

HARVARD LAW REVIEW

© 2006 by The Harvard Law Review Association

A TRIBUTE TO JUSTICE SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR

On the occasion of her retirement from the Supreme Court of the United States, the editors of the Harvard Law Review respectfully dedicate this issue to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg*

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s twenty-four years on the Supreme Court’s bench are cause for celebration. She has been rightly praised for her independence, self-reliance, practicality, and self-possession. Of all the accolades, one strikes me as describing my dear colleague best. Growing up on the Lazy B Ranch in Arizona, Justice O’Connor could brand cattle, drive a tractor, and fire a rifle with accuracy well before she reached her teens. One of the hands on the Ranch recalled his clear memory of Sandra Day: “She wasn’t the rough and rugged type, but she worked well with us in the canyons – she held her own.”1

Justice O’Connor did just that at every stage of her professional and family life. The first woman to serve on the Supreme Court brought to the Conference table experience others did not possess: the experience of growing up female in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, of raising a family, of doing all manner of legal work – government service, pri vate practice, successive successful candidacies for legislative and judi cial office, leadership of her state’s Senate, state court judicial service, first on a trial court, then on an appellate

Afterword: Lazy B and the Nation’s Court: Pragmatism in Service of Principle

Craig Joyce*

[T]here is something about living in big empty space, where people are few and distant, under a great sky that is alternately serene and furious, exposed to sun from four in the morning till nine at night, and to a wind that never seems to rest – there is something about exposure to that big country that not only tells an individual how small he is, but steadily tells him who he is.

– Wallace Stegner 1

On the morning of July 16, 1945, Sandra Day and her father, Harry (“DA”),2 stood in the kitchen of Lazy B, the Day family ranch on the Arizona-New Mexico border, rinsing off the breakfast dishes. The sink sat below a window with a view to the northeast. The morning sun had not yet risen. Suddenly, they saw what the daughter would one day recall, in Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest, as “an enormous flash of intense light… in the distance. There was no sound. A dark cloud formed where the light had been, and then the cloud rose in the sky.”3

Weeks would pass before Sandra and her father learned that they had seen, 180 miles away, the first test of the atomic bomb.4 In many ways, that ranch window would prove to be a window to the future –

* Andrews Kurth Professor of Law, and Co-Director, Institute for Intellectual Property & In formation Law, University of Houston Law Center; Editor, SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR, THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW: REFLECTIONS OF A SUPREME

JUSTICE O’CONNOR AND THE “RIGHT TO DIE”: CONSTITUTIONAL PROMISES UNFULFILLED

Michael P. Allen*

INTRODUCTION

There will be much written about Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and her legacy. If nothing else, after all, she was the first woman ever to serve on the United States Supreme Court. But there is far more to Justice O’Connor’s place in the American legal landscape. She was a pivotal swing vote on a highly-divided Court. As such, her views were often critical to the development of the law over the past two decades.1 And let us not forget that she was one of the five votes that effectively decided the 2000 presidential election.2 There simply is no denying that Justice O’Connor will be remembered as a major figure in American law whether one praises or despises her jurisprudence.3

The popular press has already begun to review and assess the impact Justice O’Connor made in a number of substantive areas of law. Most frequently men tioned among these areas are affirmative action, abortion, the First Amendment’s

* Associate Professor of Law, Stetson University College of Law; B.A., 1989, University of Rochester; J.D., 1992, Columbia University School of Law. I am grateful to my colleague Becky Morgan for her comments and her support. Thanks also to the staff of the Stetson Faculty Support Office for their work on this Essay. Finally, I express my gratitude to the staff of the William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal for the work done on this Essay.

1 For example, “[o]ver the

IN HONOR OF SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR

JUSTICE SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR: NO INSURMOUNTABLE HURDLES

Scott Bales*

Sandra Day O’Connor has often said that, as “a cowgirl from Eastern Arizona,” she was as surprised as anyone when President Ronald Reagan nominated her in 1981 as the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.1 Her surprise reflects her unassuming, down-to-earth manner.

But O’Connor’s experiences as a cowgirl from Arizona and from serving in each branch of its state government-along with her ties to Stanford-were critical factors in her appointment. This same background, I believe, goes far to explain why, by the time of her 2006 retirement, she is regarded as the world’s most influential woman lawyer, both for her role on the Court and as a global spokesperson for judicial independence and the rule of law.

O’Connor spent her childhood on her family’s Lazy B Ranch, which straddled the border of New Mexico and Arizona. The remote ranch-more than 200 miles southeast of Phoenix and about 200 miles northwest of El Paso–occupied almost 200,000 acres of sparse, arid land in the high Sonoran desert. “It was no country for sissies, then or now. Making a living there takes a great deal of hard work and considerable luck.”2 Much turned on the vagaries of weather and the livestock markets. Life on the cattle ranch was not easy, and when O’Connor was born the ranch house lacked indoor plumbing, electricity, and running water. By the age of eight, O’Connor had learned

IN-VERSION

John K. Setear*

It is 1985. Ronald Reagan is battling the Evil Empire. Joe Gibbs has just taken the Washington Redskins to two Super Bowls. Michael Jackson, resculpted but not yet freakish, leads a huge chorus in “We Are the World.” Sandra Day O’Connor has been the First Woman on the U.S. Supreme Court for four years and, in the Washington social milieu of the time, still probably resides on the A-list ahead of any of the aforementioned men.

So, if you clerked for Justice O’Connor in 1985, everyone you met anywhere knew who your employer was once they knew who your employer was. Everyone anywhere would then tend, incomprehensibly, to skip over such important questions as how you got such a great job, or whether you were worried that you might persuade her to adopt a position that law professors would then gleefully tear to pieces for generations to come. Instead, they would invariably ask, “What’s she like?”

“Really smart,” would be an excellent and accurate answer-but, sadly, one that was often dismissed. Inquisitors tended already to believe either that all Justices were smart (if the inquisitor was a normal person) or that all Justices must be dumb (if the inquisitor worked for a member of Congress). Additionally, the occasional wiseacre would ask, “Well, then, how come William H. Rehnquist graduated first in that Stanford Law School class and Sandra Day only graduated third?” (I have always wondered who graduated second: Wally Pipp, Jr.?)

“Okay,” your inquisitor

The 102d Justice to serve on the Supreme Court was also the first whose name begins with the letter “O.” Knowledgeable scholars and students of the Court’s history are not likely to attach great significance to that fact. While Byron White was undoubtedly the finest athlete ever to serve on the Court, and also was an avid golfer, I am quite sure that No. 102 broke 90 more regularly than he did. I doubt that that fact will provide No. 102 with her principal claim to fame either. While a third happenstance—that she was also the first woman to serve on the Court—will be widely noted and acclaimed, in my judgment that is merely another interesting aspect of Sandra Day O’Connor’s remarkable career and remarkable contribution to the work of the Court.

I firmly believe that it is the consistent quality of excellence in her opinions that will provide the most accurate and reliable evidence for future historians who write about her work. This quality appears not only in her opinions in cases subject to significant public attention, but also in the less heralded cases that are the grist of our docket. Consider, for example, her lucid and honest opinion in Lingle v. Chevron U.S.A. Inc., 544 U.S. 528 (2005), which, if not the very best, was surely one of the best opinions announced last Term. Or her dissent in Atwater v. Lago Vista, 532 U.S. 318 (2001), with its forceful and persuasive points made in the clearest possible prose.

Having had the privilege of working with