Subjects:
Sandra Day O'Connor was born on March 26,1930 in El Paso, Texas. As a child, she lived on her family's 155,000 acre cattle ranch in southeastern Arizona. Her parents sent her to live with her grandmother when she was five to get a better education in El Paso where she attended Radford School For Girls. At the age of thirteen, she returned to the ranch to attend school, which was twenty two miles away. She only stayed a year, then returned to Radford. A year after that, she transferred to Austin High School where she graduated at the age of sixteen. She attended Stanford Law1where she majored in economics and earned a BA Degree with honors. She earned her LL.B. Degree and ranked third in her class out of 102 students in 1952. The top ranking student in her class was future Supreme Court Justice William H. Rehnquist. Also in 1952 she married one of her fellow law students John O'Connor, and moved to Phoenix, Arizona. They had three sons, Scott, Jay, and Brian.
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O'Connor may not have been appointed if she where an man because even though she was undeniably competent and her appeal was added to by the fact of her connections and friendship to Justice Rehnquist, her judicial record was not that great, but Reagen needed a woman on the court because in the eighty's, the woman's movement was prominent enough to cause an issue out of the fact that there had never been a woman Supreme Court Justice.
O'Connor can be a role model to men and women of all ages, whether its because of her excellence in school, or because of her conservative, yet feminist actions, or whether it is because of her determination that took her so far. She was elected judge of the Maricopa County Superior Court, Phoenix, Arizona and served from 1975-1979. She became Civilian Attorney for Quartermaster Market Center, Frankfurt, Germany in 1954, Private Practice of Law in Maryvale, Arizona in 1958, and Assistant Attorney General for State of Arizona in 1965. O'Connor was nominated Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on July 7, 1981 by President Reagan and was sworn in as the 102nd Justice and the 1st woman member ever on September 25, 1981. In 1972, she was elected Arizona Senate Majority Leader, and served as Chairwoman of the State, County, and Municipal Affairs Committee in 1972 - 1973. She was appointed to Arizona Court of Appeals By Governor Bruce Babbit and served from 1979-1981. Either way, Sandra Day O'Connor is an extraordinary woman.
O'Connor favors limiting government spending, restoring of the death penalty ( she once voted to put to death a sixteen year old killer), she voted for the Equal Rights Amendment, supported revisions in protective legislation for women, example: the maximum hours women are allowed to work. She opposed a resolution that called for a constitutional ban on abortion, but she also voted to restrict state funds for the poorer women's abortions, s he supported the idea of hospital employees to refuse to give an abortion.
O'Connor has acted much like any conservative male court justice might have acted. She favors, in part, women's right to abortion.
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