The fading legacy of Sandra Day O’Connor, a trailblazing justice

SANDRA DAY O’CONNOR was the first woman to serve on America’s Supreme Court. President Ronald Reagan appointed the Arizonan (who had been both a state senator and judge) in 1981, a year after promising to end the high court’s 191-year monopoly of men. Unlike the second woman to serve on the court—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020 while still in robes—Justice O’Connor vacated her seat a generation before her death at the age of 93 on December 1st. The pathbreaking centrist justice who emerged as a swing vote in countless significant cases thus lived to witness the dismantling of key elements of her legacy as the Supreme Court .“It is not often in the law”, Justice Stephen Breyer lamented in 2007, a year after Justice O’Connor’s departure, “that so few have so quickly changed so much.” He was summarising his dissent from a 5-4 ruling opposing programmes for racial integration in public schools that Justice O’Connor’s replacement, the much more conservative Samuel Alito, made possible. In 2003 Justice O’Connor had written a decision affirming a 25-year-old precedent that had permitted universities to consider an applicant’s race in admissions. Pitching the benefits of affirmative action as “not theoretical, but real”, she pointed to elite universities as the “training ground for a large number of our nation’s leaders”. The “path to leadership”, she wrote, must be “visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity”.