In 1981, President Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor (1930-2023) to be the first female justice to the Supreme Court, which fulfilled his campaign promise.  Sandra Day O’Connor was an American attorney, politician, and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006, twenty-five years, the first woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice.  Before O’Connor’s tenure on the Court, she was an Arizona state judge and earlier an elected legislator in Arizona, serving as the first female majority leader of a state senate as the Republican leader in the Arizona Senate.  Upon her nomination to the Court, O’Connor was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate.  O’Connor usually sided with the Court’s conservative bloc but on occasion sided with the Court’s liberal members.  She often wrote concurring opinions that sought to limit the reach of the majority holding.  Her majority opinions in landmark cases include Grutter v. Bollinger and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.  In 2000, she wrote in part the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore.  In 1992, she was one of three co-authors of the lead opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that preserved legal access to abortion in the United States.  On July 1, 2005, O’Connor announced her retirement.  At the time of her death, O’Connor was the last living member of the Burger Court.  Samuel Alito was nominated to take her seat in October 2005.  During her term on the Court, O’Connor was regarded as among the most powerful women in the world.  After retiring, she succeeded Henry Kissinger as the chancellor of the College of William & Mary.  In 2009, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.  She was born in El Paso, Texas, but grew up on a 198,000-acre family cattle ranch near Duncan, Arizona.  When she was 16 years old, Day enrolled at Stanford University, and later graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in economics in 1950.  She continued at Stanford Law School for her law degree in 1952.  There, she served on the Stanford Law Review, whose then presiding editor-in-chief was future Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist.  She graduated in the top 10 % of her class.  On December 20, 1952, John Jay O’Connor III and Day married at her family’s ranch.  She and her husband in the army lived in Germany for three years.  They then settled in Maricopa County, Arizona, to begin their family with son, Scott (born 1958), Brian (born 1960), and Jay (born 1962).  Sandra volunteered in various political organizations, such as the Maricopa County Young Republicans, and served on Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964.  She served as assistant Attorney General of Arizona from 1965 to 1969.  In 1969, the governor of Arizona appointed O’Connor to fill a vacancy in the Arizona Senate.  She ran for and won the election for the seat the following year.  By 1973, she became the first woman to serve as Arizona’s or any state’s majority leader.  As a skilled negotiator and a moderate, after serving two full terms, O’Connor decided to leave the Senate.  In 1974, O’Connor was appointed to the Maricopa County Superior Court, serving from 1975 to 1979, when she was elevated to the Arizona Court of Appeals.  She served on the Court of Appeals-Division One until 1981 when she was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan.  She had quite a resume.  Thus, she got unanimous approval in the Senate to become the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court.  Anti-abortion and various religious groups opposed O’Connor’s nomination because they suspected, correctly, she would not be willing to overturn Roe v. Wade.  In 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the second female Supreme Court justice.  O’Connor said that she felt relief from the media clamor when she no longer was the only woman on the Court.  What do you know about Sandra Day O’Connor?