The 1981 date, and what actually happened in 1967
Sandra Day O’Connor was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 1981, not in 1967. President Ronald Reagan announced his choice in July 1981, the Senate confirmed her in September by a unanimous vote, and she took her seat later that month. She was the first woman to serve as a justice.
The Supreme Court appointment of 1967 was a different milestone. Thurgood Marshall was nominated by President Lyndon Johnson in June 1967, confirmed by the Senate in August, and sworn in in October as the first Black justice. The two appointments are often confused because both are “firsts” in the history of the Court, but they are fourteen years apart.
The Court of 1967
When Marshall joined, the Court was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren and had the following members, listed here without trying to rank them:
- Hugo Black
- William O. Douglas
- John Marshall Harlan
- William Brennan
- Potter Stewart
- Byron White
- Abe Fortas
- Thurgood Marshall, who replaced Tom Clark
Clark retired in 1967, and the timing is often noted because Johnson had earlier named Clark’s son, Ramsey Clark, as Attorney General. Reportedly the retirement was connected with avoiding a conflict of interest, which is a plausible and often repeated explanation.
The Court of these years is known as the Warren Court because of its string of decisions on civil liberties, criminal procedure and race. In 1967 it decided Loving v. Virginia, which struck down state laws against interracial marriage, and In re Gault, which dealt with the rights of juveniles in court. Marshall joined after the term in which those cases were decided, but his appointment tied directly to the civil rights movement, since he had argued many of the major school segregation cases as a lawyer before becoming a judge.
Who was Sandra Day O’Connor?
O’Connor was born in 1930 and grew up partly on a family ranch in Arizona. She studied at Stanford, including its law school, where she graduated near the top of her class in the early 1950s. Despite that record, she reportedly struggled to be hired by private law firms because she was a woman, and she began her legal career in public service, as a county deputy attorney.
Her path to the Court ran through state politics and the state courts. She served in the Arizona Senate, where she became majority leader, a position generally described as a first for a woman in any state legislature. She then became a state trial judge and, in 1979, a judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals. Reagan named her to the Supreme Court two years later, having said during his 1980 campaign, reportedly, that he would appoint a woman to the Court at the first opportunity.
Her years on the Court
O’Connor sat on the Court until she retired in January 2006. She was often described as a pivotal vote on closely divided cases, but descriptions of her judicial approach vary, and it is best to treat them with caution. Notably, she was often seen as practical and cautious rather than driven by a single theory of law.
Why the 1967 context still matters
The reason 1967 is worth setting beside 1981 is that both appointments were responses to a changing country. Marshall’s appointment followed the civil rights movement and came in a year of unrest, including the Detroit uprising and the Newark riot in the summer. Johnson reportedly described the nomination as the right thing to do at the right time, and Marshall’s confirmation came after Senate questioning, with some Southern senators opposed.
O’Connor’s appointment followed a different set of changes. By the late 1970s women were entering law schools in much larger numbers, and the women’s movement had pressed for equal treatment in employment and public life. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had already placed some of those debates in federal law, and the Voting Rights Act dealt with voting rather than employment.