Both inside and outside the courtroom, O’Connor inspired a generation of women

When Laney Serface was a young girl growing up in Northern California, she pinned a news article about Sandra Day O’Connor among the ephemera of theater tickets and photos on her bulletin board.

“She held one of the highest positions in our government, and that made me feel like I could do that too,” said Ms. Serface, an actor in Los Angeles who has long seen Ms. O’Connor, the first woman to serve in this capacity. function takes effect. as a judge on the United States Supreme Court, as a source of inspiration.

Rhesa Rubin, a lawyer from Tucson, Arizona, met Judge O’Connor in the 1990s and has kept a framed, inscribed snapshot of their meeting ever since. “I’ve had the photo in every office I’ve worked in,” she said, adding that she sometimes vented to the portrait about the challenges of the legal profession.

RonNell Andersen Jones, one of Judge O’Connor’s clerks, recalled her boss’s stories of deep-seated sexism, of graduating at the top of her law school from Stanford University and still being offered only a secretarial job at a law firm .

“It was a real gift for me to be able to learn from her and see the barriers she broke and the ways in which I benefited from them,” said Ms. Andersen Jones, who is now a law professor.

Judge O’Connor’s death on Friday set off a cascade of reflections across the country. Elected officials from all levels of government praised her intelligence and influence. Former clerks remembered her mentorship and guidance. Analysts viewed her legal legacy as a moderate Republican whose decisions often supported women’s rights.

Ms. O’Connor was a powerful judge who sat in the middle of the court’s ideological spectrum. But she made a series of influential statements on issues such as abortion, sexual harassment and gender discrimination, which were of crucial importance to women.

She once called abortion “abhorrent” and criticized Roe v. Wade, but later upheld the core of the 1973 ruling; she also wrote decisions that strengthened the effect of Title IX and held school districts accountable for ignoring sexual harassment.

Outside the legal community, many Americans remembered her simply as an extremely powerful, respected figure who had broken one of the greatest glass ceilings.

“Just to see someone in her position was absolutely inspiring,” said Lynette Westendorf, 72, a composer and musician from Wenatchee, Washington.

Ms. Westendorf watched Judge O’Connor during oral arguments in a Supreme Court case in 2001 and remembered little about the other members of the court. But Ms. O’Connor was exciting, she said.

“She got straight to the point with the most pointed, relevant questions,” she said. “She was so confident and eloquent.”

For many women, the figure of Judge O’Connor was a source of admiration and relief, a rare female figure in a position of leadership in American life.

On her way to becoming a clinical psychologist, Molly Witten had gritted her teeth over the questions that only women in her profession seemed to be asked: whether she would be comfortable giving certain exams to a man, or whether she should give priority to adding ‘madam’. instead of “Ph.D.” after her name.

“I had no role models, and then along comes this woman, Sandra Day O’Connor, who says, ‘I can make decisions and think independently,’” Ms. Witten, now 75 and living in Chicago, recalled in an interview. . “And from that day on I was a Sandra Day O’Connor fan.”

“She said the things I felt,” Ms. Witten added, “and men listened to her.”

Judge O’Connor was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and announced in 2005 that she would step down to spend time with her ailing husband — a decision that many women found moving and, in its own way, relatable.

“She embodies the complication of being a wife, a mother and a professional,” said Cathleen McLaughlin, a New York attorney who entered law school shortly after Judge O’Connor was nominated to the bench and considered her one of the few role models of that time.

Judge O’Connor set the tone in her chambers by hiring a large number of female law clerks, setting her apart from the other judges. And while she was demanding—she accepted no excuses for mistakes, a lesson she learned from growing up on a ranch in the West—she also took an interest in her clerks and their personal lives.

“She would give them career advice, she would give them jobs,” said historian Evan Thomas, who interviewed 94 of O’Connor’s former law clerks for his justice biography.

“She told them to get outside and exercise, always take care of your family, throw good dinners and never be too busy to take care of people,” he said. “You had to have a life.”

Among the women who served under Judge O’Connor, there was a keen awareness of both the barriers she had broken and her desire to be seen outside of that history. Some recounted her wish that her gravestone would reflect only that she had been a good judge, her relief when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg became a second woman to serve on the court and her insistence that her gender did not influence her decisions.

“If you look at her case law on sex discrimination, it is clear that she is putting forward a perspective that may be shared by people who are not women, but that would have been shaped by the fact that she was a woman – and the same is probably true of true for her abortion jurisprudence,” said Cristina Rodríguez, a former clerk and now professor at Yale Law School.

Judge O’Connor also got to know the women who would follow her to Washington, including Washington annual dinners with women in the Senate and on the Supreme Court.

In her cases involving sexual harassment and discrimination, Judge O’Connor typically conducted a careful legal analysis, avoiding political posturing and insisting on a demanding interpretation of the law.

In 1999, she wrote, in the majority opinion, that students who are sexually harassed by peers in public schools may be able to sue the school for failing to stop the harassment. That case, known as Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, involved a fifth-grade girl in Georgia who was the victim of repeated sexual harassment by a boy at her school. Despite reports to multiple teachers over several months, the boy was not punished.

Judge O’Connor wrote in that 5-to-4 decision, the girl’s mother sought to hold the school board accountable “for its own decision to remain silent in the face of known harassment of students in their schools.”

Years later, in a landmark case interpreting Title IX, the federal civil rights amendments that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs receiving federal funding, Judge O’Connor wrote in 2005 that the law prohibited school officials from retaliating against people who made allegations of sex discrimination.

The case involved the male coach of a girls high school basketball team in Birmingham, Alabama, who had complained that the team was not receiving equal funding and was subsequently removed from his coaching position. Judge O’Connor wrote for the court that he had the right to bring a case against the school district and argue that his removal was retaliation for filing a sex discrimination complaint.

And in a case that would later have important implications for the admission of women to all-male schools, Judge O’Connor wrote for the majority in 1982 that a state-sponsored nursing school for women could not deny a man entry solely because of his gender. “Rather than offset the discriminatory barriers women face,” Judge O’Connor wrote, the Mississippi school’s policy of excluding men from admission to the School of Nursing tends to perpetuate the stereotypical view of nursing as an exclusive to perpetuate women’s jobs.”

In her final years, Judge O’Connor, who suffered from dementia, had withdrawn from public view in Arizona.

Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud, who clerked for Judge O’Connor from 1984 to 1985, remained closely associated with the justice system for decades and last visited her in August.

She cradled a pillow with the name of her alma mater, he said in an interview Friday — “in love with Stanford to the end” — and received excellent care in the final days of her life.

Mr. Syverud reflected on what he called her legacy of moderation and respect for differences, and her convictions on the issue of equal rights for women.

“She felt obligated to make sure others came after her,” he said. “She felt the obligation to be first was heavier than anything I had ever seen.”

Kirsten Noyes research contributed.