Home Appointments Associate Justice
Associate Justice
US Supreme Court
| Appointee | Sandra Day O'Connor |
|---|---|
| Role | Associate Justice |
| Organisation | US Supreme Court |
| Domain | Judiciary |
| Start | 25 September 1981 |
| End | 31 January 2006 |
| Notes | First woman on US Supreme Court |
Institutional context
The Supreme Court of the United States was established by Article III of the Constitution and convened in 1790. From 1790 through 1981, all 101 prior Justices were male — a span of 191 years.
Career path
O'Connor earned a BA in economics from Stanford in 1950 and a JD from Stanford Law School in 1952, graduating near the top of her class. Despite her academic record she received no offers from California law firms and worked initially as a deputy county attorney. She served as Assistant Attorney General of Arizona, was elected to the Arizona State Senate in 1969 and served as that body's first woman Majority Leader, and was appointed to the Maricopa County Superior Court and the Arizona Court of Appeals.
Appointment
President Reagan nominated her on 7 July 1981, fulfilling a 1980 campaign commitment to appoint a woman to the Court. The Senate confirmed her unanimously, 99–0, on 21 September 1981. She was sworn in on 25 September 1981 and served until her retirement on 31 January 2006.
Tenure
Twenty-four years. Her opinions and concurrences were frequently the controlling vote in the Court's most divided cases of the period. Decisions in which she played a pivotal role include Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), and Bush v. Gore (2000).
Cluster context
O'Connor's 1981 appointment is the dataset's earliest US first and is an isolated event by twelve years from the next first-woman appointment in this dataset (Reno at Justice in 1993). The 1981–1993 gap is a typical-of-the-baseline interval; the post-2018 cluster compresses comparable firsts into single years.