During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan promised that “one of the first Supreme Court vacancies in my administration will be filled by the most qualified woman I can possibly find.” In 1981, after he entered the White House, he said he “identified such a person” in Sandra Day O’Connor.
What it means to be “the most qualified,” in Reagan’s words, is a question that looms large again because of President Biden’s campaign promise to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court. He has nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for the position that will be vacated when Justice Stephen G. Breyer, for whom she clerked, retires.
At the time that O’Connor was nominated, she had no federal judicial experience and scant appellate experience. She graduated with a B.A. in economics and at the top of her Stanford Law School class. When she left Stanford, she was unable to secure a paid position and began working as a volunteer for the San Mateo County attorney’s office in California. She later served for four years as the assistant attorney general of Arizona. O’Connor was appointed to, and subsequently elected to, the Arizona Senate, where she served as majority leader. She was elected to the Maricopa County State Superior Court in 1975, then appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals in 1979. Less than two years later, she was nominated to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
