Everything she did made history: Sandra Day O’Connor’s legacy

Although the United States was founded, as John Adams once said, to be “a government of laws and not of men,” for more than two centuries it was almost exclusively men who wrote and interpreted those laws.

That was until Sandra Day O’Connor, raised on a remote cattle ranch in the rural Southwest, joined the United States Supreme Court.

Beyond shattering that glass ceiling, Justice O’Connor – who died Friday – left an indelible mark on American law and American society. For a time considered the most powerful woman in the country, she used her cautious and pragmatic approach to cases to shape the law on major issues ranging from abortion and affirmative action to executive branch war powers and the 2000 presidential election.

She was a trailblazer in more ways than one. Before she became a justice, she was the first woman to hold a leadership position in a state legislature, as the majority leader in the Arizona Senate. And after she retired from the high court she served as a leading advocate for civics education and judicial independence around the world. Tactfully – and sometimes bluntly – she asserted herself in the male-dominated realms of law and politics, paving the way for generations of women after her.

There have been five women justices on the Supreme Court since Justice O’Connor’s confirmation in 1981, but she can also be viewed as the end of an