Affirmed: The Impact of Sandra Day O'Connor

• Author: Barbara J. Dawson
• Pages: 31-34

Published in Litigation, Volume 47, Number 1, Fall 2020. © 2020 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association. 31

Affirmed

The Impact of Sandra Day O’Connor

BARBARA J. DAWSON

The author is a partner with Snell & Wilmer, Phoenix, and was the Section of Litigation chair for the 2019–2020 bar year.

The author thanks Claudia Steadman and Megan Carrasco for their contributions to this article.

In our Spring 2020 issue, we celebrated the impact of Justice

Sandra Day O’Connor through reminiscences by some of her

law clerks. See 46 L no. 3, Spring 2020, at 28–30. But

there was even more to Justice O’Connor. The following further

observations and reflections, also by former law clerks about the

first woman to serve as a justice of the United States Supreme

Court, supplement and enhance our original tribute.

On a sunny day in Arizona, with the thermometer hitting 104

degrees, then Litigation Section Chair Barb Dawson and three of

Justice O’Connor’s early clerks, all of whom share deep Arizona

ties, met to discuss some of the effects of her life and work. The

setting was the Phoenix office of Snell & Wilmer, one of the

many law firms where, based on her gender, Justice O’Connor

was denied employment decades earlier. But it was also the firm

where Justice O’Connor made a special appearance more re-

cently to christen a Women in Leadership Program promoting

the advancement of women in the firm and the profession. Such

generosity in the pursuit of positive change has been a hallmark

of Justice O’Connor’s legacy.

Sandra Day began her undergraduate studies at Stanford

University in 1946 at age 16. Within just six years, she had com-

pleted both her BA and JD at Stanford. During law school there,

she met her husband, John O’Connor, as well as a future chief

justice of the United States, William Rehnquist. Following the

early years of her career and after starting a family, she served

as the assistant attorney general of Arizona. In 1969, she was ap

-

pointed to the Arizona Senate by the governor of the state and

then won election for the next year. During her two terms in the

state senate, she became the first woman to serve as Arizona’s,

or any state’s, majority leader.

Known for her negotiation and mediation skills, O’Connor

was elected to the Maricopa County Superior Court in 1975 and

served until 1979. She served on the Arizona Court of Appeals

until she was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981. She

retired from the Court in 2005. In March 2020, she celebrated

her 90th birthday, in her home state of Arizona.

Ruth McGregor is a trailblazer in her own right. She practiced

at Fennemore Craig and became the firm’s first female partner.

She remembers Justice O’Connor’s nomination to the Supreme

Court very fondly. Driving to work, she heard of it over the car

radio. “I just burst into tears. I had to pull my car over onto a

side street to sit there until I could get control again and drive

the rest of the way to the office.”

Ruth got to know Sandra Day O’Connor socially through

John O’Connor, who was Ruth’s law firm partner and mentor at

Fennemore Craig. She helped Justice O’Connor prepare for the