Sandra Day O'connor Quotes

Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom.

Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?

We don’t accomplish anything in the world alone and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry off one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that create something.

A state of war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens.

The power I exert on the court depends on the power of the power of my arguments, not my gender

She didn't wallow in problems or reveal self-doubt.

Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles or morality, but that cannot control our decision,' she said. 'Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.

Less than one-third of eighth-graders can identify the historical purpose of the Declaration of Independence - and it's right there in the name.

For both men and women the first step in getting power is to become visible to others, and then to put on an impressive show...As women achieve power, the barriers will fall. As society sees what women can do, as WOMEN see what women can do, there will be more women out there doing things, and we'll all be better off for it.

She looked for common ground. She did not nurse grudges.

It is the individual who can and does make a difference even in this increasingly populous, complex world of ours. The individual can make things happen. It is the individual who can bring a tear to my eye and then cause me to take pen in hand. It is the individual who has acted or tried to act who will not only force a decision but also have a hand in shaping it. Whether acting in the legal, governmental, or private realm, one concerned and dedicated person can meaningful affect what some consider an uncaring world. So give freely of yourself always to your family, your friends, your community, and your country. The world will pay you back many times over.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: For both men and women the first step in getting power is to become visible to others, and then to put on an impressive show. . . . As women achieve power, the barriers will fall. As society sees what women can do, as women see what women can do, there will be more women out there doing things, and we’ll all be better off for it.XII

August 19, 1981: President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Male justices who had made noises over the years about resigning if a woman ever joined their ranks stay put.

Do not look back, do not regret, take life as it comes and make the most of it. That was Ada Mae’s way, and in time it would be her daughter’s way, too.

Change the standard for reviewing presumptions about women and you change the entire body of law.

O’CONNOR WAS THE most powerful Supreme Court justice of her time. For most of her twenty-four-plus years on the Court, from October 1981 to January 2006, she was the controlling vote on many of the great societal issues, including abortion, affirmative action, and religious freedom, so much so that the press came to call it the O’Connor Court.

The dogs went crazy last night,” Gennie said. “Do you want me to tell you about it?” “Definitely,” Grace replied. “Start at the beginning. Leave nothing out. What are the dogs’ names?” “Bernie Sanders, Elliot Stabler, Olivia Benson, Sandra Day O’Connor, and RuPaul were the troublemakers,” Gennie said. “Unsurprising, with that group,” Grace said. “Go on.

Even in my own time and in my own life, I have witnessed a revolution.

State legislative and administrative bodies are not field offices of the national bureaucracy,” she wrote. A quarter century later, her view was generally that of the majority.

How small we are in the universe but, even so, how one small voice can make a difference.

O'Connor had a knack for bringing a personal - and winning - touch to a situation when people least expected it.

she always thought she was entitled to anything available to any other human of any gender. GRACE

Reed was huge because it was the first case where the Court refused to accept legal distinctions

v. Wade, the abortion case, on sweeping privacy grounds instead of as an extension of the principle of women’s equality. Resting

Whatever rivalries there were among the justices in O'Connor's first years, she appeared to look beyond them. Whatever slights she felt, she kept to herself. Whatever grudges she nurtured, she kept them secret. In face, she would write to Blackmun as her first term wound down: 'As the term concludes, I wanted to tell you what a privilege it has been for me to work with you this year. Your knowledge and the care you exhibit with all you do sets a wonderful example.' As she had in legislative politics, she always struck an outwardly positive note.

In every age, there comes a time when leadership suddenly comes forth to meet the needs of the hour. And so there is no man who does not find his time, and there is no hour that does not have its leader.

At first blush,' she continued, 'this ancient saying suggests merely that there will always be a Moses when Moses in needed. Yet, on further examination of the words 'there is no man who does not find his time,' we realize that the message conveyed is that each of us, in our own individual lives and the crises we face, will have a time to lead. Whether we will lead only a famnily, or a handful of friends, and where and how we will lead, is up to us, our views, and our talents. But the hour will come for each of us.

By 1980 the bipartisan consensus on women—that the laws should not discriminate on grounds of sex and that qualified women should be allowed to compete for jobs at every level—had seriously unraveled. There was no more room for good-government Republicans to agree to disagree on matters such as the Equal Rights Amendment while well-heeled women such as Anne Armstrong and Pat Lindh “nagged” long-suffering men in the White House for a token appointment here and there. At its 1980 convention, the Republican Party, firmly in the hands of the conservative wing, and about to nominate Ronald Reagan, repudiated its support for the Equal Rights Amendment and allied itself publicly with the opponents of women’s abortion rights. Polling revealed that women were starting to peel off from the Grand Old Party. Four years later, the gender gap, wherein women disproportionately support the Democratic candidate and men the Republican, would emerge as a constant in American politics.

Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time.

We have long since made it clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens.

RBG’s image as a moderate was clinched in March 1993, in a speech she gave at New York University known as the Madison Lecture. Sweeping judicial opinions, she told the audience, packed with many of her old New York friends, were counterproductive. Popular movements and legislatures had to first spur social change, or else there would be a backlash to the courts stepping in. As case in point, RBG chose an opinion that was very personal to plenty of people listening: Roe v. Wade. The right had been aiming to overturn Roe for decades, and they’d gotten very close only months before the speech with Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and Sandra Day O’Connor had instead brokered a compromise, allowing states to put restrictions on abortion as long as they didn’t pose an “undue burden” on women—or ban it before viability. Neither side was thrilled, but Roe was safe, at least for the moment. Just as feminists had caught their breath, RBG declared that Roe itself was the problem. If only the court had acted more slowly, RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” This analysis remains controversial among historians, who say the political process of abortion access had stalled before Roe. Meanwhile, the record shows that there was no overnight eruption after Roe. In 1975, two years after the decision, no senator asked Supreme Court nominee John Paul Stevens about abortion. But Republicans, some of whom had been pro-choice, soon learned that being the anti-abortion party promised gains. And even if the court had taken another path, women’s sexual liberation and autonomy might have still been profoundly unsettling. Still, RBG stuck to her guns, in the firm belief that lasting change is incremental. For the feminists and lawyers listening to her Madison Lecture, RBG’s argument felt like a betrayal. At dinner after the lecture, Burt Neuborne remembers, other feminists tore into their old friend. “They felt that Roe was so precarious, they were worried such an expression from Ruth would lead to it being overturned,” he recalls. Not long afterward, when New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested to Clinton that RBG be elevated to the Supreme Court, the president responded, “The women are against her.” Ultimately, Erwin Griswold’s speech, with its comparison to Thurgood Marshall, helped convince Clinton otherwise. It was almost enough for RBG to forgive Griswold for everything else.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said: “By enforcing the [Religion] Clauses, we have kept religion a matter for the individual conscience, not for the prosecutor or bureaucrat. At a time when we see around the world the violent consequences of the assumption of religious authority by government, Americans may count themselves fortunate: Our regard for constitutional boundaries has protected us from similar travails, while allowing private religious exercise to flourish. . . . Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?

strength of our country. It is the relationship between ourselves and the generations which follow.

The court did not adopt an “intermediate scrutiny” test until five years later, in another case that Ruth argued and won. The test would be strengthened further in a 1982 opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Soon before retiring from the Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said: “By enforcing the [Religion] Clauses, we have kept religion a matter for the individual conscience, not for the prosecutor or bureaucrat. At a time when we see around the world the violent consequences of the assumption of religious authority by government, Americans may count themselves fortunate: Our regard for constitutional boundaries has protected us from similar travails, while allowing private religious exercise to flourish. . . . Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”11

I thought of Jack Nicholson telling Shirley MacLaine that a stiff drink “might kill the bug you got up your ass.” I thought of John Riggins, the great, wild running back of the Redskins, telling Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at a White House dinner to “loosen up, Sandy baby.

The Bush administration caught a break when the Supreme Court handed down a compromise on June 29. Ruling 5–4, the justices preserved key portions of the Pennsylvania law but also upheld Roe, striking down the portion of the Abortion Control Act that placed an “undue burden” on the mother’s efforts to seek an abortion, which was just the spousal notification requirement. The court also overturned the trimester standard governing abortion restrictions in favor of the looser concept of “viability.” Sandra Day O’Connor, writing the majority opinion, expressed a degree of exasperation with the Republican administration’s continued efforts to attack Roe: “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), that definition of liberty is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe.” Justice O’Connor’s opinion also included a good deal of concern for the institutional damage that would happen if the court were politically whipsawed to overturn the settled precedent of Roe: “A decision to overrule Roe’s essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court’s legitimacy, and to the nation’s commitment to the rule of law. It is therefore imperative to adhere to the essence of Roe’s original decision, and we do so today.” In his dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist complained that the court had rendered Roe a “facade” and replaced it with something “created largely out of whole cloth” and “not built to last.” “Roe v. Wade stands as a sort of Potemkin village,” Rehnquist wrote, “which may be pointed out to passers-by as a monument to the importance of adhering to precedent.

In Shaw v. Reno, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor emphasized her concern about the shape of North Carolina’s 12th District. This long, skinny I-85 District, as shown in figure 3.2, stretched across 160 miles of the Carolina Piedmont and seemed on its face to violate the notions of compactness. Justice O’Connor observed, “We believe that reapportionment

Sandra Day O’Connor, the only recent judge to have served as a legislator, understood the inherently political nature of redistricting and refused to join her colleagues who wanted to undo plans that advantaged one party. Acknowledging that partisanship is endemic in the key partisan decisions surrounding new districts, how can a judge determine when there is too much partisanship? Attempts

The downward trend for women in the postwar years also appears for PHD and law degrees, with a greater proportion of women earning degrees in the 1930s than in the 1950s (see Figure 2.3). The percentage of medical degrees granted to women was about the same in the 1930s and the 1950s, possibly because medical schools limited entering classes to 5% women no matter how many qualified women applied, in an informal but systematic program of discrimination. (The Women’s Equity Action League eventually sued U.S. medical schools for sex discrimination in the 1970s.) Law was even more limited: A scant 3% of graduating lawyers were women in the 1950s and early 1960s, and many had trouble finding jobs. Despite graduating at the top of their law school classes, future Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O’Connor (b. 1930) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. 1933) both struggled to land jobs when they graduated in the 1950s.

Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.

In Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court held that the United States’ exercise of authority over Guantánamo gave the detainees a constitutional right to bring their habeas corpus claims in federal district courts. The Court also held that the procedures authorized under the Military Commissions Act, which called for military tribunals to look into the detention of the Guantánamo detainees, were not an adequate substitute for habeas. As the Court explained, “[t]he laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, even in extraordinary times. Liberty and security can be reconciled; and in our system, they are reconciled within the framework of the law.”17

Upon her retirement, Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor reflected on her pioneer status. “My concern was whether I could do the job of a justice well enough to convince the nation that my appointment was the right move. If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women.

The end of World War II was, Philip Roth wrote in American Pastoral, “the greatest moment of collective inebriation in history.

She would walk away from fights she deemed unnecessary, while never shying away from the important ones. She knew when to tease, when to flatter, and when to punch the bully in the nose.

Relentlessly sociable and bent on a public life, the transition to the legislature was natural for a woman who never seemed to recognize how uppity she was.

And she always thought she was entitled to anything available to any other human of any gender.

She once said that she went back to practicing law after a few years of tending to her family in order to get some respite from the demands of the Junior League! Her reliance on voluntarism was a constant theme in her life, public as well as private.

wandering off to bars. “I

During the Court’s first oral argument, Scalia asked so many questions that Powell turned to Thurgood Marshall, who sat beside him on the bench, and whispered, “Do you think he knows the rest of us are here?

one of the most important things to me is that my children and grandchildren are curious. Because, if you’re not curious, you’re not smart.

cooperation from other litigators in the field. . . . [S]he tended to inspire collaboration and respect rather than competition. She was not a person who was vain in any way. She did not try to capture the limelight.

I've never done a job that I didn't think was a stretch." -Sandra Day O'Connor

You know, the Court is not like a legislature; we don’t vote a particular way because we would like that outcome. We have to account for everything we do by giving reasons for it. So there’s no cross-trading at all on the Court. What there can be is, instead of deciding the great big issue, we can agree on a lower ground, on a procedural issue, perhaps. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was a grand master at that—getting the Court to come together on a ground on which we could agree, and defer the bigger battle for another day.

Golda Meir in Israel, Geraldine Ferraro on the Mondale ticket, Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, Sally Ride in space.

Two days later, Sandra achingly wrote to her son Jay from Washington:

Sandra was the product of a world in which Mexicans and Anglos routinely mixed, in part because every Anglo family in El Paso that could afford one had a Mexican housekeeper. Sandra could be a demanding boss; she expected the household helpers to keep up with her rapid-fire schedule, and a few quit or were let go. At the same time, she never raised her voice, and she invited the help to join the family for dinner. When one of the maids became pregnant, she made sure the mother and child were well cared for.

She is an achieving woman without an edge. She is good-looking without being alienatingly beautiful and bright without being alarmingly intellectual,' wrote McGrory.