5 books to read about Sandra Day O’Connor
Readers see a judge who was aware of the significance of her position and who knew what she wanted her legacy to be. As Jeffrey Toobin put it in the Book Review, “While still a judge and in good health, she gave instructions to her sons regarding the public portion of her funeral, writing, ‘I hope I have helped pave the way to pave the way for other women who have done so. chosen to pursue a career. ”
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‘Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest’, by Sandra Day O’Connor and H. Alan Day (2002)
O’Connor and her brother Day joined forces to reminisce about growing up on their family’s cattle ranch on the Arizona-New Mexico border. As Linda Greenhouse wrote in her review: “To Eastern, urban sensibilities, her early life is not only exotic, but almost impossible to reconcile with the Sandra Day O’Connor the public knows: the prim and button-down former president of the Phoenix Junior League, at home at formal dinners and on country club golf courses, who grew up to become the first woman on the United States Supreme Court.”
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“Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World,” by Linda Hirshman (2015)
Hirshman’s book is a detailed account of the time O’Connor and Ginsburg, two of the most influential women in recent United States history, spent together. “For anyone interested in the court, women’s history, or both, the story of Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, their separate routes to the Supreme Court, and what they accomplished during the more than a dozen years they spent together is irresistible,” Greenhouse wrote in her review. “Did Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg really change the world? Or did they make it all the way to the Supreme Court, as the first and second women to ever serve there, because the world had changed?”
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‘Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court’, by Sandra Day O’Connor (2013)
O’Connor was in a historical, reflective mode here, considering the origins of the institution whose modern history she helped define. As Michiko Kakutani wrote in her review: “The reason to read ‘Out of Order’ is to get Judge O’Connor’s succinct, pithy account of how the current court – so powerful, so controversial and so often dissected by the media – has evolved from such lawsuits. Its beginnings were so surprisingly modest and uncertain that it initially seemed like a venture built entirely on ad hoc principles.’
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‘The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court’, by Jeffrey Toobin (2007)
Based on interviews with judges and clerks, Toobin, a former New Yorker staff writer and CNN legal analyst, discussed about three decades in the court’s history under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. As David Margolick wrote in the Book Review, “O’Connor was clearly Toobin’s most important source. She is also – readers can decide if it’s a coincidence – his hero: the justice, he argues, whose pragmatic, bottom-line jurisprudence single-handedly kept the court close to the American mainstream, especially in the field of cases as reproductive freedom. and positive action.”