Sandra Day O’Connor

Sandra Day O'Connor

Sandra Day O’Connor was the first woman nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States. She was considered the swing vote for the Rehnquist Court and the beginning of the Roberts Court. Her majority opinions in landmark cases include Grutter v. Bollinger and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. On August 12, 2009, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.

About Sandra Day O’Connor in brief

Summary Sandra Day O'ConnorSandra Day O’Connor was the first woman nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States. She was considered the swing vote for the Rehnquist Court and the beginning of the Roberts Court. As a moderate Republican, she tended to approach each case narrowly without seeking to establish sweeping precedents. On August 12, 2009, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. Her majority opinions in landmark cases include Grutter v. Bollinger and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. She retired from the Court on July 1, 2005, and Samuel Alito was nominated to take her seat in October 2005 and joined the court on January 31, 2006. She is the author of Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American West, written with her brother, H. Alan Day, a book about her childhood experiences on the ranch. Her sister was Ann Day, who served in the Arizona Legislature, and her husband was Maricopa County, Arizona, district attorney Keith Sorensen. She has a daughter and son-in-law, both of whom have served as members of the Arizona Supreme Court. Her husband was drafted into the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Corps and served in Germany for three years before returning to the states. She served as the first female majority leader of a state senate as the Republican leader in theArizona Senate. She also worked as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California, after she offered to work for no salary and share a small office with a secretary.

She worked with San Louis Dematteis and deputy district attorney Louis Demetteis as a district attorney and district attorney respectively. She married John Jay O’ Connor III on December 20, 1952, on her family’s ranch near Duncan, Arizona. She had two younger siblings, a sister and a brother, respectively eight and ten years her junior. She dated future Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist while at Stanford Law School in the 1950s and 1960s. She and her brother Ann Day later wrote a book, L lazy B: Growing up in the West, about their experiences on a cattle ranch in Arizona. O’Conner and her sister Ann Day have a son, Michael Day, and a daughter, Sandra Day Day, Jr., who both served as Arizona state Supreme Court justices. They have two sons, Michael and Michael O’ Conner, who were both elected to the Arizona House of Representatives in the 1980s and 1990s. They are both still living in the same home in San Francisco, California. She currently lives with her husband and their daughter in Scottsdale, Arizona and has a husband and three children. She lives in a retirement home in Arizona with her family and has three grandchildren. She spent her eighth-grade year living at the ranch and riding a bus 32 miles to school. She began driving as soon as she could see over the dashboard and had to learn to change flat tires herself. She graduated magna cum laude with a B. A. in economics in 1950.