First Woman to Supreme Court

On September 25th, Sandra Day O'Connor was sworn in as the first female judge on the Supreme Court. Mrs. O'Connor had been nominated by President Reagan. Sandra Day O'Connor born March 26, 1930 and she is a retired United States Supreme Court justice. She served as an Associate Justice from her appointment in 1981 by Ronald Reagan until her retirement from the Court in 2006. She was the first woman to be appointed to the court.

Prior to O'Connor's appointment to the Court, she was an elected official and judge in Arizona. On July 1, 2005, she announced her intention to retire effective upon the confirmation of a successor. Samuel Alito was nominated to take her seat in October 2005, and joined the Court on January 31, 2006.

O'Connor tended to approach each case narrowly without arguing for sweeping precedents. She most frequently sided with the court's conservative bloc.

In the latter years of her tenure, she was regarded as having the swing vote in many cases as the court grew more conservative. O'Connor was Chancellor of The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and currently serves on the board of trustees of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Several publications have named O'Connor among the most powerful women in the world. On August 12, 2009, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor of the United States, by President Barack Obama.

On July 7, 1981, Reagan who had pledged during his 1980 presidential campaign to appoint the first woman to the Court nominated O'Connor as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, to replace the retiring Potter Stewart. For the first time in history a woman is appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where she becomes a friendly rival to a liberal associate. O'Connor was successfully treated for breast cancer in 1988, she also had her appendix removed that year. One side effect of this experience was that there was perennial speculation over the next seventeen years that she might retire from the Court.