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You needed some language credits and some math credits some science. Luckily, in those days, Stanford still had almost two years’ worth of required courses or subject areas-Western Civ, for example, which was just marvelous. I not only didn’t feel prepared, I had no idea what course of study I should follow. I don’t think that would happen today.ĭid you arrive with a particular career path in mind? So he called Stanford’s admissions office and said, “I have this good student here, and you have to let her start and give her the entrance exam after she gets there.” And they did, if you can believe it. The principal at my high school was very upset when he realized that the school had not let me know when the college entrance exam was being held. You were quite a bit younger than typical freshmen. My focus on Stanford undoubtedly came from what he had hoped to do, although neither my dad nor my mother ever told me where to apply. My father had wanted to go to Stanford, but he ended up going back to take care of the Lazy B Ranch and never left it. I didn’t think I had had as good a high school education as a majority of my fellow Stanford students, many of whom had come from wonderful schools and had taken classes far more sophisticated than I had. Friends from those days describe you as very mature and focused-as one of them put it, “She wasn’t a giggly schoolgirl.” Yet when you arrived you were only 16. Let’s begin with your Stanford experience. This is an edited transcript of the conversation. On October 28, three weeks into the current Supreme Court term, and one day after White House counsel Harriet Miers withdrew her name from consideration for O’Connor’s seat on the bench, O’Connor talked about her life and career in a 20-minute interview from her home in Phoenix with STANFORD editor Kevin Cool. “She has set the gold standard for women lawyers for generations to come,” adds Sullivan. On a moonlit night in the Quad in 1999, O’Connor inaugurated Sullivan as the first female dean of Stanford Law School and “helped unstintingly thereafter. “She has been extraordinarily generous toward the women who came after her,” notes Sullivan, who knows from personal experience. Day, do you type?’ And it taught my generation, by then a quarter of the legal profession, that women lawyers could do anything and everything in the law,” says Sullivan. “Her ascension up the court steps put definitively to rest the era when law firms had asked her, despite her academic brilliance, ‘Ms. But according to Stanford law professor Kathleen Sullivan, O’Connor’s appointment and her subsequent performance on the court “changed the landscape for women lawyers forever. Several leading law schools, including Stanford’s, had all-male faculties into the 1970s. When she enrolled at Stanford Law School in 1949, just 1 percent of law students in the country were women. She also will be remembered for the influence she had on women, particularly in the legal profession. As the only serving justice ever to hold elected office-she was a senator in Arizona from 1969 to 1975-O’Connor has tended to decide cases on narrow grounds, and avoided opinions that would impose federal laws on the states. Although she often voted with conservatives on the court, her opinions on matters involving affirmative action and abortion, for example, yielded outcomes favored by liberals. A self-described conservative when she was confirmed 99-0 to the court in 1981, O’Connor has not been governed by ideology. Her jurisprudence defied easy characterization. Some legal scholars decried O’Connor’s power to determine cases and even suggested expanding the number of justices to avoid what George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley called “a court of one.” So pivotal was her role, lawyers arguing cases before the nine justices often devised legal strategies aimed specifically at her. As the so-called “swing vote” on several landmark cases, she has been described as the most powerful woman in the United States. O’Connor, ’50, JD ’52, long ago grew beyond the legend that would naturally attach to the first woman named to the nation’s highest court. After the September 3 death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, ’48, MA ’48, JD ’52, created another vacancy on the court, O’Connor donned her robe for a 25th year while awaiting the confirmation of a successor. The grandkids had to wait a while longer. By the time the Supreme Court’s new term began, she said, “I assumed I might be trout fishing in Montana or seeing my grandchildren in Arizona.” “As many of you know, I did my best to retire last summer,” she joked. On October 20, Sandra Day O’Connor addressed cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.
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