Sandra Day O'Connor, a Reagan nominee who was the first woman to serve on the US Supreme Court, and the first SCOTUS nominee to have televised confirmation hearings, died today of complications of dementia. She was 93.
O'Connor spent 25 years on the Court, from 1981 to 2006, and as a moderate conservative often played the role of the swing vote on SCOTUS. Even so she showed an ability to cross ideological lines if the ruling aligned with her legal beliefs: she authored Bush v Gore but upheld abortion in Planned Parenthood v Casey.
She and Rehnquist are the only "legal" names that stand out from my childhood; not that I knew or cared about SCOTUS or what they were deciding, but because Rehnquist was a Milwaukee native and O'Connor an influential "first."
RIP
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