Sandra Day O’Connor leaves a deep legacy in American political and civic life

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Sandra Day O’Connor died Friday long after the approach she took to legal issues, and the persona she applied to her experience in three branches of state government, had vanished from the American scene.

Ms. O’Connor, whose childhood was rooted in a rural, ranching America that also has largely disappeared, was both first (a woman on the Supreme Court) and last (a justice whose legal views were not rigidly tied to one of the battling ideologies in the country’s civic life).

As a hinge in the American story, Ms. O’Connor, who was 93, grew up adept at roping steers on a broad Arizona plain and finished her career roping in fellow jurists to reach consensus. This permitted her to achieve a remarkable record of being on 300 majority opinions, including rulings upholding abortion rights and affirmative action at universities – two topics where her Republican-appointed successors in recent years overturned decades of precedent.

“She knew the difference between political reasoning and legal reasoning,” former justice David Souter, a fellow Republican appointee on the Supreme Court and a long-time guest at the O’Connor Thanksgiving Day table, said in an interview. “In legal reasoning, no one could push her around. For that matter, no one ever pushed her around.”

That may be the legacy of growing up on a 6.7-square-kilometre ranch on the Arizona-New Mexico border only a half generation after the two states were admitted to the American union. As a child she branded cows, learned to handle a .22-calibre rifle and used a cattle tank as a swimming pool.

“It was no country for sissies, then or now,” she wrote in her 2002 memoir, Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest. “Making a living there takes a great deal of hard work and considerable luck.”

Her career was determined more by hard work than luck; after she graduated from the Stanford Law School as one of only five women in her class, her job applications were repeatedly rejected. She was left to resorting to offering to work for free as a law clerk to a county district attorney and was taken on, she wrote later, only after “I wrote him a long letter, explaining all the reasons why I thought I could do things that would be useful in the office.”

Eventually, she became the first woman to serve as a majority leader in a state legislature; she used the post to crusade for women’s rights, including overturning a 1913 law that prevented women from working more than eight hours a day, an impediment to gaining employment at that time.

When it came time for Ronald Reagan to nominate a successor to justice Potter Stewart, Ms. O’Connor was, according to a White House aide involved in the choice, “the right age, the right combination of experience, the right political affiliation, the right backing.”

In her September, 1981 confirmation hearings, viewed by 100 million people, she described the Supreme Court as “the body to which all Americans look for the ultimate protection of their rights,” adding, “It is to the U.S. Supreme Court that we all turn when we seek that which we want most from our government: equal justice under the law.”

Ms. O’Connor, whom Mr. Reagan described as a “person for all seasons,” was confirmed on a 99-0 vote, another emblem of a long-past era. An AP-NBC poll showed that 65 per cent of the country supported her appointment.

Along with her liberal-leaning views, she also supported the death penalty and the criminalization of gay sexual practices. She backed limiting the federal government’s ability to interfere with the states and voted to send George W. Bush to the presidency in the Supreme Court case that followed the overtime presidential election of the year 2000.

“What made her stand out was in hiring clerks with a wide range of ideological viewpoints,” said David Kravitz, deputy state solicitor in Massachusetts and a former O’Connor clerk. “She listened to viewpoints from everyone for every case.”

That absence of ideological inflexibility set her apart. “I admired her relentless ability to remain unpretentious and genuinely open-minded,” said former Canadian Supreme Court justice Rosalie Abella. “She had an evolutionary appreciation of her role on the court and became one of its most important members because of her commitment to collegiality and rigour. I came to admire and, really, love her.”

When Ms. O’Connor left the court in 2006, she was succeeded by Samuel Alito, the author of the ruling overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

“She upheld, he overturned,” said Daniel Urman, a Northeastern University expert on the Supreme Court. “Her legacy of moderate opinions captured the mood and views of the nation. She believed law should be downstream from where politics and public opinion stood. Where the country stood, O’Connor stood.”