Sandra Day O’Connor: The Supreme Court’s Last Politician

Sandra Day O’Connor, who has died at 93, will be best remembered as the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court. That is enough by itself to secure her place in history. Her impressive and inspiring life story shows how far she came, from growing up on a cattle ranch without running water or electricity to entering Stanford at age 16 to rising in the ranks of a legal profession that was mostly closed to women in her formative years. Upon graduating law school, she couldn’t get a legal job, but she did get four marriage proposals during law school — one of them from William Rehnquist, with whom she would ultimately serve on the Court for 24 years. In the end, it was devotion to her own marriage that led to her retirement from the Court to care for her husband, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Even O’Connor’s fiercest critics as a judge scarcely had a bad word to say about her personally.