I'm late in posting this and, frankly, so many things have been posted it would hardly be necessarily.
Justice O'Connor was the first woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Frankly, even though this came in relative terms, in 1981, fairly close to the pioneering appointment of an African American to the Supreme Court bench, it was later than it should have been. Having said that, like Nixon going to China, coming by way of a conservative, Ronald Reagan, perhaps it meant more in real terms than it would have had it come under an earlier President, such as Jimmy Carter.
O'Connor had been a member of the Arizona Court of Appeals at the time of her appointment. She was a Westerner by birth, having been raised on a 198,000 acre cattle ranch in that state. She attended Stanford as an undergrad and as a law student, and oddly enough had received a proposal of marriage from William Rehnquist while still a student.
Her accomplishments cannot be denied, but frankly, like a lot that Reagan did, her appointment has a mixed record. I frankly don't think she was as great of jurist as people now wish to recall, and like many of the "conservative" justice of her era, she was conservative only in a very reserved way. True conservatives wouldn't really reappear on the Supreme Court for many years, none of which takes away from her personal accomplishments.
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