Sandra Day O'Connor dies at age 93: First woman to serve on the Supreme Court passes away

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has died in Phoenix, Arizona at the age of 93.

The first woman to serve on the highest court in the United States passed away from 'complications due to advanced dementia,' the court said. 

O'Connor was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, confirmed unanimously in the Senate and served from 1981 to January 2006, retiring to take care of her husband who had Alzheimer's. 

The former lawyer was a moderate conservative and considered a swing vote under Former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. 

She frequently sided with her conservative colleagues on the court - like she did in Bush v. Gore, handing the 2000 presidential election to Republican President George W. Bush - but she also sometimes sided with liberals.

She upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and the use of affirmative action in college admissions. 

In what looks liberal-leaning now since last summer's Dobbs decision, O'Connor was a key architect when the Supreme Court upheld Roe v. Wade in the case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. 

The case affirmed the central takeaway of Roe, that the Constitution protected a right to privacy and thus a right to an abortion.

But it also changed how and when women could exercise that right. 

The Casey decision said women could have an abortion to the point of viability - the point in which a fetus could survive outside a womb - and the state could not impose an 'undue burden' on access to abortion. 

The Dobbs decision overruled both Roe and Casey.

O'Connor's childhood was spent growing up on the Lazy B Ranch in Arizona, where she branded cattle, drove tractors and fired rifles. 

The house didn't have running water nor electricity until O'Connor was seven-years-old. 

It did have literature for O'Connor to absorb, as he parents subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, Vogue, Time magazine, the Saturday Evening Post and more. 

'They were raised to believe that if you had money, you traveled extensively, got a good education and lived frugally,' recalled the justice's brother's wife, for a 1989 profile of O'Connor in The Washington Post. 

At age 6, O'Connor was sent to live with her grandmother in El Paso so she could attend better schools, and was so smart that she skipped two grades. 

At just age 16, O'Connor enrolled in Stanford University, and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in economics in 1950. 

She went on to Stanford Law School where she served on the Stanford Law Review alongside the future chief justice, Rehnquist. 

During their time on the law review, she dated Rehnquist, but said no when he proposed marriage. 

'We went to a few movies,' she told Fox News in 2003. 'He was a brilliant, entertaining young man.' 

O'Connor started dating John Jay O'Connor III during her final year in law school and they were married in December of 1952. 

In her early years as a lawyer, O'Connor found that none of the large California firms would hire a woman, so she worked for the deputy county attorney for San Mateo County. 

After John O'Connor satisfied him mandatory military service in Germany, the couple moved to Phoenix, where he took a job in corporate law and O'Connor opened a tiny practice with one other lawyer. 

The couple started to have children and that took a frontseat to O'Connor's career for several years, but she got involved in politics, especially when family friend Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964. 

In 1965 O'Connor went back to work as an assistant attorney general in Arizona.

Four years later O'Connor was chosen to fill out the term of a state Senate seat being vacated by a female lawmaker who was chosen to serve in Nixon's administration. 

She then ran for that seat, and won it, in both 1970 and 1972. 

In 1973, O'Connor was elected state Senate majority leader, becoming the first woman to hold that position. 

A year later, O'Connor was appointed to the Maricopa County Superior Court and then was elevated to the Arizona State Court of Appeals in 1979. 

Reagan then chose her for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981.