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(Rehnquist was attracted to her, the film tells us, but by that time she had already met the law student John Jay O’Connor, whom she would marry.)ĭespite her excellent law school credentials, the only job offer she received from a law firm was for a secretarial position. She graduated from Stanford’s law school, where one of her classmates was her future court-mate William H. Raised in the 1930s on an Arizona cattle ranch, so smart that she skipped two grades and entered Stanford as a freshman in 1946 when she was just 16, Sandra Day was a lifelong Republican. (There have still been just five female justices, three of whom are currently on the court, which is, of course the all-time high.) Her story is also a reminder of how recently it was that entrenched, jaw-dropping sexism made it that much more amazing and important that slightly more than two centuries into Supreme Court history, a woman, O’Connor, finally broke the gender line. But once you get past that, the film will remind you that although she was nominated by conservative hero Ronald Reagan (his first high court pick) and squired to her confirmation hearings by Barry Goldwater, a famously hard-line conservative senator, she ended up occupying for years the court’s ideological center and therefore delivering the key swing vote on a great many cases. It’s titled “The First,” obviously referring to O’Connor’s standing as the first-ever of her gender to serve as a justice on the U.S.
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It’s two hours long and contains no sensational new findings, but for a history and Constitution nerd like me, the upcoming “American Experience” documentary on the life and career of Sandra Day O’Connor was catnip.