the women we study: sandra day o’conner
Sandra Day O'Connor's most consequential opinion never once uses the word "legitimacy" in its holding, but the idea runs underneath nearly everything she wrote across twenty-five years on the Supreme Court: that a court's authority is borrowed, not owned, and that it survives only for as long as the public believes the institution is acting in good faith.
That argument reaches its clearest expression in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the joint opinion O'Connor co-authored with Justices Anthony Kennedy and David Souter. The opinion could have ruled narrowly on abortion rights and stopped there. Instead, it turned to a harder question: what happens when a court reverses itself under political pressure rather than legal necessity. Overturning precedent for reasons unrelated to the law, the justices wrote, would seriously weaken the Court's capacity to function as a court at all. For O'Connor, legitimacy was never a given — it was a resource, accumulated slowly and spent easily.
That conviction took shape long before she reached the bench. O'Connor graduated third in her class at Stanford Law School in 1952, two spots behind future Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and found that the law firms she approached afterward would offer her a desk as a secretary, not a seat as an attorney. So she built her authority somewhere else: as a deputy county attorney, then Arizona's assistant attorney general, then a state senator who became, in 1972, the first woman in the country to lead any state senate. Two judgeships followed — the Maricopa County Superior Court in 1974, the Arizona Court of Appeals in 1979 — before President Reagan nominated her to the Supreme Court in August 1981, fulfilling a campaign pledge to appoint a woman to the first vacancy of his presidency. The Senate confirmed her 99–0. On September 25, she was sworn in as the first woman to sit on the Court, a distinction she held alone for the next twelve years.
The path mattered as much as the destination. By the time O'Connor reached Washington, she had already spent more than a decade inside the machinery of a state government, learning what she would later argue was the actual substance of institutional authority: not the power written into a title, but the accumulated trust of the people that institution served.
When O'Connor retired in 2006, she did not step back from institutions — she built one. Troubled by how few Americans understood the basic workings of their own government, she founded iCivics in 2009, a nonpartisan civic education platform that now reaches millions of students annually — a project she came to consider more significant than any opinion she had authored on the bench. "We must arm today's young people with innovative civic education that is relevant to them," she said. "Bringing high-quality civics to every school in every state of our union is the only way that the next generations will become effective citizens and leaders."
The distinction she was drawing was not sentimental. Institutions do not run on the authority written into their founding documents alone. They run on the ongoing consent of the people who agree to treat them as legitimate — a consent that has to be taught, tested, and renewed with every generation, not inherited and assumed. An institution can retain every formal power it was designed to hold and still lose the thing that makes those powers usable.
After leaving the bench, O'Connor spent the rest of her public life pressing the same case outside the courtroom that she had made inside it: that self-government survives only for as long as the people living under it understand how it actually works.
