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WASHINGTON—Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court and its most influential justice for much of her tenure, announced Tuesday she has been diagnosed with dementia and is withdrawing from a post-retirement career that extended her influence from the classroom to the White House.
“As this condition has progressed, I am no longer able to participate in public life,” said Justice O’Connor in a statement released by the Supreme Court. “Since many people have asked about my current status and activities, I want to be open about these changes, and while I am still able, share some personal thoughts,” she said.
The greatest legacy she hoped to leave, she said, was a renewed commitment to civics education, her principal cause since stepping down from the high court in 2006.
Justice O’Connor, 88 years old, said her dementia’s cause was “probably Alzheimer’s disease”—the same affliction that claimed her husband, John, and the president who appointed her, Ronald Reagan.
“It is a real downer. First Dad, then Mom,” Scott O’Connor, eldest of the justice’s three sons, said in an email to The Wall Street Journal. “She is at peace and not suffering any signs of depression, thankfully.”
Justice O’Connor was an Arizona state judge in 1981 when President Reagan, fulfilling a campaign pledge to break the male monopoly on the high court, selected her to succeed retired Justice Potter Stewart.
“How fortunate I feel to be an American,” she said Tuesday. “As a young cowgirl from the Arizona desert, I never could have imagined that one day I would become the first woman justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.”
The appointment seized a talking point from Democrats, since President Jimmy Carter had intended to name the first woman justice, but no vacancies during his term provided an opportunity. The centrism that marked her tenure, however, frustrated many conservatives who sought to outmaneuver the court’s liberal wing rather than find common ground with it.
President George W. Bush used her retirement to shift the court significantly to the right by appointing Justice Samuel Alito, a nominee vetted by the same conservative legal establishment that later produced Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
During her 24-year tenure, Justice O’Connor frequently wielded the court’s deciding vote, with a pragmatic approach and a knack for compromise that reflected the broader American mainstream more than it appealed to ideological theorists of the left or right.
Confirmed unanimously by the Senate, Justice O’Connor immediately prompted changes in the formerly all-male institution; most obviously, the traditional courtesy title of “Mr. Justice” was dropped, in favor of “Justice” alone. Donning a leotard, she inaugurated an aerobics class for female law clerks.
Her other impacts were more substantive. Although she had told Mr. Reagan she considered abortion “personally abhorrent,” she joined Justices Anthony Kennedy and David Souter to write the controlling opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1992 case that sought middle ground by upholding several state restrictions on the procedure while affirming the “essential holding” of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision recognizing a constitutional right to terminate pregnancy.
Likewise, in 2003, when the court considered two separate affirmative-action programs at the University of Michigan, Justice O’Connor voted to strike down the undergraduate admissions formula as too focused on race, while writing the majority opinion upholding the law school’s more individualized consideration of race among other characteristics.
Under today’s court, those two decisions may be in jeopardy. The July retirement of Justice Kennedy, who since Justice O’Connor’s retirement typically held the swing vote, saw the court’s conservative bloc solidify with Justice Kavanaugh’s appointment.
Justice Kavanaugh’s writings suggest skepticism of those opinions as well as others where Justice O’Connor sought middle ground, including some dealing with the proper role of religion in government activities.
In a statement, Chief Justice John Roberts called Justice O’Connor “a towering figure in the history of the United States and indeed the world.” The chief justice, whose first months on the court overlapped with Justice O’Connor’s last, said that “she serves as a role model not only for girls and women, but for all those committed to equal justice under law.”
In retirement, Justice O’Connor maintained a blazing schedule, continuing to sit as a substitute judge on federal appeals courts, serving on the Iraq Study Group that sought to find a way out of the war, becoming chancellor or honorary leader of the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and spearheading the Sandra Day O’Connor Project on the State of the Judiciary at Georgetown University Law Center.
In Arizona, she dedicated her old home as the O’Connor House for Public Discourse, and wrote books for children.
Her main passion, she said Tuesday, was the iCivics project that provides online educational tools for middle- and high-school students.
Through “shared understanding of who we are that we can follow the approaches that have served us best over time—working collaboratively together in communities and in government to solve problems, putting country and the common good above party and self-‐interest, and holding our key governmental institutions accountable,” she said.
“It is time for new leaders to make civic learning and civic engagement a reality for all,” she said.
Write to Jess Bravin at [email protected]
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