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Sandra Day O'Connor Essay

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Sandra Day O'Connor Perhaps no other jurist could have come to the Supreme Court under greater expectations. When President Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O'Connor in 1981 to be the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court, he did soto keep a campaign promise. O'Connor's nomination was quick to draw criticism from both the political people left and right. Conservatives put down her lack of federal judicial experience and claimed that she didn't have any constitutional knowledge. They considered her a wasted nomination and suspected her position on abortion. Liberals, on the other hand, could not deny their satisfaction at seeing a woman on the High Court, but they were disappointed in O'Connor's apparent lack of strong support for …show more content…

Her younger brother and sister were not born until she was eight years old, leaving her to spend many years as an only child. To make up for the loneliness, she made friends with many of the ranch's cowboys and kept many pets, including a bobcat. O'Connor read a lot in her early years and engaged in many farm activities. She learned to drive at age seven and could fire rifles and ride horses very well by the time she turned eight. The isolated ranch made formal education difficult so O'Connor's parents sent her to live with her maternal grandmother in El Paso. Sandra went to the Radford School, a private academy for girls, from kindergarten through high school. Suffering from extreme homesickness, she stopped going and returned to Arizona for a year. Still, she graduated with good marks at the age of sixteen. O'Connor gives credit much to her grandmother for being such a great influence on her. She credits her grandmother's confidence in her ability to succeed as her motivation for refusing to admit defeat. After high school, O'Connor went to Stanford University where she majored in economics. She chose economics originally with the goal of applying that knowledge towards the operation of a ranch of her own or even the Lazy-B Ranch. A legal dispute over her family's ranch, however, stirred her interest in law and O'Connor decided to enroll at Stanford Law School after receiving her baccalaureates degree magna cum laude in 1950.It

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