President Biden, all nine sitting Supreme Court justices, family and friends came together Tuesday at the Washington National Cathedral for the funeral of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman on the high court.
The service was held after the public was able to visit O’Connor’s casket, lying in repose at the Supreme Court the day prior. O’Connor attended the National Cathedral and served eight years on its governing board.
President Biden described O’Connor as “a person for all seasons” and said she viewed the Supreme Court as the “bedrock of America.”
“Gracious and wise, civil and principled, Sandra Day O’Connor, the daughter of the American West, was a pioneer in her own right — breaking down barriers in the legal and political worlds and the nation’s consciousness,” said Mr. Biden.
“May God bless Sandra Day O’Connor, an American pioneer,” he said.
He attended the service solo. First lady Jill Biden is believed to have remained in Delaware.
The invitation-only service for O’Connor came after her death Dec. 1.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. spoke about his time on the bench with O’Connor, and recalled her as being very direct.
He said once they were discussing a case in chambers and he kept going back and forth on the right outcome. Her response was, “You just have to decide.”
“Her approach was simple and direct: Get it done,” Chief Justice Roberts said.
Her son Jay O’Connor said she did it all as a wife, mother and Supreme Court justice. “She had unearthly energy,” he said.
O’Connor was the 102nd member of the Supreme Court, serving from 1981 to 2006.
In 2018, she announced she had dementia and would no longer appear in public. She died of the disease.
O’Connor was appointed to the court by President Reagan in 1981 and confirmed unanimously by the Senate.
On the bench, O’Connor’s influence could best be seen, and her legal thinking most closely scrutinized, in the court’s rulings on abortion. She refused in 1989 to join four other justices ready to reverse the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that said women have a constitutional right to abortion.
Then in 1992 she helped lead a five-justice majority that reaffirmed Roe’s core holding.
“Some of us as individuals find abortion offensive to our most basic principles of morality, but that can’t control our decision,” O’Connor said in court, reading a summary of the decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”
That case was effectively overruled last year when the high court said the issue of abortion belongs to the states.
After O’Connor stepped down 17 years ago, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. took her seat.
She served on the high court under the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, as well as a few months under Chief Justice Roberts before her retirement.
Rehnquist and O’Connor both attended Stanford Law School and dated briefly. He proposed marriage to her, but she declined.
Her husband, John O’Connor, died in 2009. She is survived by her three sons and six grandchildren.
The granddaughter of a pioneer who traveled west from Vermont and founded the family ranch three decades before Arizona became a state, O’Connor had an independent spirit. Growing up in the outback, she learned early to ride horses, round up cattle and drive trucks and tractors.
O’Connor was born in Texas, but made her political and judicial life in Arizona, where she served as assistant attorney general, in the state Senate and as a judge on the Court of Appeals.
She wasted little time building a reputation as a hard worker who wielded considerable political clout on the nine-member court.
“I didn’t do all the things the boys did,” she said in a 1981 Time magazine interview, “but I fixed windmills and repaired fences.”
On the high court, O’Connor was a moderate conservative justice. She became a bit more liberal in her opinions during her later years as the court grew more conservative.
She authored the opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan. In her opinion, O’Connor suggested there would be a time limit on the practice of using race as part of admissions criteria. The high court effectively overturned that ruling recently.
She also landed in the majority with Bush v. Gore, a 5-4 ruling that handed the 2000 election to Republican George W. Bush by ending recount challenges.
O’Connor was regarded with great fondness by many of her colleagues. When she retired, Justice Clarence Thomas, a consistent conservative, called her “an outstanding colleague, civil in dissent and gracious when in the majority.”
She could, nonetheless, express her views tartly. In one of her final actions as a justice, a dissent to a 5-4 ruling to let local governments condemn and seize personal property to allow private developers to build shopping plazas, office buildings and other facilities, she warned the majority had unwisely ceded yet more power to the powerful.
“The specter of condemnation hangs over all property,” O’Connor wrote. “Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing … any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.”
She is expected to be cremated, with her ashes spread at Arizona’s Lazy B Ranch, where she was raised.
• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.
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