What We Lost When We Lost Sandra Day O'Connor by Linda Greenhouse
'This has been a month of sad remembrances — the 20th anniversary of Sept. 11, of course, and the anniversary last Saturday of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. An additional, less noted anniversary is an occasion not for sorrow but for wonder. Forty years ago this Saturday, on Sept. 25, 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor took her seat on the Supreme Court.
I use the word “wonder” because of how what once seemed remarkable is today a commonplace; of the 12 justices to join the court in the ensuing decades, four have been women, including three of the last five. Most people in the United States today were not yet born on that early fall afternoon when Sandra O’Connor took the oath of office and ended 191 years of an all-male Supreme Court.
The overflowing audience included President Ronald Reagan, whose nomination of a little-known judge on Arizona’s intermediate appellate court fulfilled a campaign promise — regarded by some as impetuous — to name the first woman to the court. For those of us who were old enough in 1981 to recognize the significance of the breakthrough, the sight of Justice O’Connor on a bench that included aging nominees of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson was electrifying.
The history of her appointment is not the only reason to think today about Sandra O’Connor, who retired 15 years ago and is now, at 91, living with dementia. At a time when the Supreme Court’s behavior seems to embody and even to amplify the country’s polarization, it’s worth reflecting on the path she took during her quarter-century on the court. . .
Over time, she largely lost the label “conservative” and became known as a “moderate.” That overused, context-dependent word has little independent meaning. What interests me is less where she stood on the court’s political spectrum than how she got there. The answer, of particular relevance today, is twofold. One, she cared about the impact of the court’s decisions — not only on the law, but on the country itself. And two, she was willing to learn.
On abortion, for example, she framed her critique of Roe v. Wade in a dissenting opinion in 1983 around the prediction that the date of fetal viability — the date before which the court had recognized a woman’s absolute right to terminate a pregnancy — was inevitably moving backward toward early pregnancy. “The Roe framework,” she wrote, “is clearly on a collision course with itself.”
Six years later, when the next major abortion case reached the court, medical organizations pointedly filed briefs describing fetal development and explaining why the date of viability was unlikely to change significantly for the foreseeable future.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/23/opinion/sandra-day-oconnor-supreme-court.html
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