Nomination and confirmation outside the
White House, July 15, 1981.|left On July 7, 1981, Reagan – who had pledged during his
1980 presidential campaign to appoint the first woman to the Court – announced he would nominate O'Connor as an associate justice of the Supreme Court to replace the retiring
Potter Stewart. O'Connor received notification from President Reagan of her nomination on the day prior to the announcement and did not know that she was a finalist for the position. O'Connor told Reagan she did not remember whether she had supported repealing
Arizona's law banning abortion. However, she had cast a preliminary vote in the Arizona State Senate in 1970 in favor of a bill to repeal the state's criminal-abortion statute. In 1974, O'Connor had opined against a measure to prohibit abortions in some Arizona hospitals. U.S. Senate Republicans, including
Don Nickles of
Oklahoma,
Steve Symms of
Idaho, and
Jesse Helms of
North Carolina called the
White House to express their discontent over the nomination; Nickles said he and "other profamily Republican senators would not support O'Connor". as her husband John O'Connor looks on. Reagan formally nominated O'Connor on August 19, 1981. Conservative activists such as the Reverend
Jerry Falwell,
Howard Phillips, and Peter Gemma also spoke out against the nomination. Gemma called the nomination "a direct contradiction of the Republican
platform to everything that candidate Reagan said and even President Reagan has said in regard to social issues." Gemma, the executive director of the
National Pro-Life Political Action Committee, had sought to delay O'Connor's confirmation by challenging her record, including support for the
Equal Rights Amendment. O'Connor's confirmation hearing before the
Senate Judiciary Committee began on September 9, 1981. It was the first televised confirmation hearing for a Supreme Court justice. The confirmation hearing lasted three days and largely focused on the issue of abortion. When asked, O'Connor refused to telegraph her views on abortion, and she was careful not to leave the impression that she supported
abortion rights. The Judiciary Committee approved O'Connor with seventeen votes in favor and one vote of present. Only Senator
Max Baucus of Montana was absent from the vote. He sent O'Connor a copy of
A River Runs Through It by way of apology. In her first year on the Court, she received over 60,000 letters from the public, more than any other justice in history.
Tenure O'Connor said she felt a responsibility to demonstrate women could do the job of justice. of the "SCOTUS", or Supreme Court of the United States. On January 20, 1989, at the
Inauguration of George H. W. Bush, O'Connor became the first female justice of the Supreme Court to administer the oath for a
Vice President of the United States (
Dan Quayle). O'Connor was a proponent of collegiality among justices on the court, often insisting that the justices eat lunch together. O'Connor said that she felt relief from the media clamor when she no longer was the only woman on the Court. In May 2010, O'Connor warned female Supreme Court nominee
Elena Kagan about the "unpleasant" process of confirmation hearings.
Supreme Court jurisprudence to the audience after swearing him in as
U.S. Attorney General, as Becky Gonzales looks on. Initially, O'Connor's voting record aligned closely with the conservative
William Rehnquist (voting with him 87% of the time during her first three years at the Court). From that time until 1998, O'Connor's alignment with Rehnquist ranged from 93.4% to 63.2%, hitting above 90% in three of those years. In nine of her first 16 years on the Court, O'Connor voted with Rehnquist more than with any other justice. O'Connor's relatively small shift away from conservatives on the Court seems to have been due at least in part to Thomas' views. When Thomas and O'Connor were voting on the same side, she would typically write a separate opinion of her own, refusing to join his. In the 1992 term, O'Connor did not join a single one of Thomas's dissents. Some notable cases in which O'Connor joined the majority in a 5–4 decision were: •
McConnell v. FEC, , upholding the constitutionality of most of the
McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bill regulating "
soft money" contributions. •
Grutter v. Bollinger, and
Gratz v. Bollinger, , O'Connor wrote the opinion of the Court in
Grutter and joined the majority in
Gratz. In this pair of cases, the
University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions program was held to have engaged in unconstitutional
reverse discrimination, but the more limited type of
affirmative action in the
University of Michigan Law School's admissions program was held to have been constitutional. •
Lockyer v. Andrade, : O'Connor wrote the majority opinion, with the four conservative justices concurring, that a 50-year to life sentence without parole for petty shoplifting a few children's videotapes under California's three strikes law was not
cruel and unusual punishment under the
Eighth Amendment because there was no "clearly established" law to that effect. Leandro Andrade, a Latino nine-year Army veteran and father of three, will be eligible for parole in 2046 at age 87. •
Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, , O'Connor joined the majority holding that the use of
school vouchers for religious schools did not violate the
First Amendment's
Establishment Clause. •
United States v. Lopez, : O'Connor joined a majority holding unconstitutional the
Gun-Free School Zones Act as beyond Congress'
Commerce Clause power. •
Bush v. Gore, , O'Connor joined with four other justices on December 12, 2000, to rule on the
Bush v. Gore case that ceased challenges to the results of the
2000 presidential election (ruling to stop the ongoing
Florida election recount and to allow no further recounts). This case effectively ended
Al Gore's hopes to become president. Some legal scholars have argued that she should have recused herself from this case, citing several reports that she became upset when the media initially announced that Gore had won Florida, with her husband explaining that they would have to wait another four years before retiring to Arizona. O'Connor expressed surprise that the decision became controversial. Some people in Washington stopped shaking her hand after the decision, and
Arthur Miller confronted her about it at the
Kennedy Center.
First Amendment O'Connor was unpredictable in many of her court decisions, especially those regarding First Amendment
Establishment Clause issues. Barry Lynn, executive director of
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said, "O'Connor was a conservative, but she saw the complexity of church-state issues and tried to choose a course that respected the country's religious diversity" (Hudson 2005). O'Connor voted in favor of religious institutions, such as in
Rosenberger v. University of Virginia (1995),
Mitchell v. Helms (2000), and
Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002). Conversely, in
Lee v. Weisman she was part of the majority in the case that saw religious prayer and pressure to stand in silence at a graduation ceremony as part of a religious act that coerced people to support or participate in religion, which the Establishment Clause strictly prohibits. This is consistent with a similar case,
Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, involving prayer at a school football game. In this case, O'Connor joined the majority opinion that stated prayer at school football games violates the Establishment Clause. O'Connor was the first justice to articulate the "no endorsement" standard for the Establishment Clause. In
Lynch v. Donnelly, O'Connor signed onto a five-justice majority opinion holding that a nativity scene in a public Christmas display did not violate the First Amendment. She penned a concurrence in that case, opining that the crèche did not violate the Establishment Clause because it did not express an endorsement or disapproval of any religion.
Fourth Amendment According to law professor
Jeffrey Rosen, "O'Connor was an eloquent opponent of intrusive group searches that threatened privacy without increasing security. In a
1983 opinion upholding searches by drug-sniffing dogs, she recognized that a search is most likely to be considered
constitutionally reasonable if it is very effective at discovering
contraband without revealing
innocent but embarrassing information."
Washington College of Law professor Andrew Taslitz, referencing O'Connor's
dissent in a
2001 case, said of her
Fourth Amendment jurisprudence: "O'Connor recognizes that needless humiliation of an individual is an important factor in determining Fourth Amendment reasonableness." O'Connor once quoted the
social contract theory of
John Locke as influencing her views on the reasonableness and constitutionality of government action.
Cases involving race In
McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), O'Connor joined a 5–4 majority that voted to uphold the death penalty for an African American man, Warren McCleskey, convicted of killing a white police officer, despite statistical evidence that Black defendants were more likely to receive the death penalty than others both in Georgia and in the U.S. as a whole. In the 1990 and 1995
Missouri v. Jenkins rulings, O'Connor voted with the majority that Federal district courts had no authority to require the state of Missouri to increase school funding to counteract racial inequality. In the 1991 case
Freeman v. Pitts, O'Connor joined a concurring opinion in a plurality, agreeing that a school district that had formerly been under judicial review for
racial segregation could be freed of this review, even though not all
desegregation targets had been met. Law professor Herman Schwartz criticized these rulings, writing that in both cases "both the fact and effects of segregation were still present". Law professor Herman Schwartz called O'Connor "the Court's leader in its assault on racially oriented
affirmative action",
Abortion The
Christian right element in the Reagan coalition strongly supported him in 1980, in the belief that he would appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn
Roe v. Wade. They were astonished and dismayed when his first appointment was O'Connor, who they feared would tolerate abortion. They worked hard to defeat her confirmation but failed. In her confirmation hearings and early days on the Court, O'Connor was carefully ambiguous on the issue of abortion, as some conservatives questioned her
anti-abortion credentials based on some of her votes in the Arizona legislature. While on the Court, O'Connor did not vote to strike down any restrictions on abortion until
Hodgson v. Minnesota in 1990. O'Connor allowed certain limits to be placed on access to abortion, but supported the right to abortion established by
Roe. In the landmark ruling
Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), O'Connor used a test she had originally developed in
City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health to limit the holding of
Roe v. Wade, opening up a legislative portal where a State could enact measures so long as they did not place an "
undue burden" on a woman's right to an abortion.
Casey revised downward the standard of scrutiny federal courts would apply to state abortion restrictions, a major departure from
Roe. However, it preserved
Roe's core constitutional precept: that the
Fourteenth Amendment implies and protects a woman's fundamental right to control the outcomes of her reproductive actions. Writing the plurality opinion for the Court, O'Connor, along with Kennedy and Souter, famously declared: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State."
Commentary and analysis O'Connor's case-by-case approach routinely placed her in the center of the Court and drew both criticism and praise.
Washington Post columnist
Charles Krauthammer, for example, described her as lacking a judicial philosophy and instead displaying "political positioning embedded in a social agenda." Conservative commentator
Ramesh Ponnuru wrote that, even though O'Connor "has voted reasonably well", her tendency to issue very case-specific rulings "undermines the predictability of the law and aggrandizes the judicial role." Law clerks serving the Court in 2000 speculated that the decision she reached in
Bush v. Gore was based on a desire to appear fair, rather than on any legal rationale, pointing to a memo she sent out the night before the decision was issued that used entirely different logic to reach the same result. They also characterized her approach to cases as deciding on "gut feelings". In 2005, she wrote a children's book,
Chico: A True Story from the Childhood of the First Woman Supreme Court Justice, named for her favorite horse, which offered an autobiographical depiction of her childhood. ==Retirement==