page_title: Sandra Day O'Connor
section_title: Voting record and deciding votes
hierarchical_section_title: Sandra Day O'Connor / Supreme Court career / Supreme Court jurisprudence / Voting record and deciding votes
context_page_description: Sandra Day O'Connor is an American attorney, politician, and jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 until her retirement in 2006. She was the first woman to serve on the Court.
  Prior to O'Connor's tenure on the Court, she was a judge and an elected official in Arizona, serving as the first female Majority Leader of a state senate as the Republican leader in the Arizona Senate. Upon her nomination to the Court, O'Connor was confirmed unanimously by the Senate. On July 1, 2005, she announced her intention to retire effective upon the confirmation of a successor. Samuel Alito was nominated to take her seat in October 2005 and joined the Court on January 31, 2006.
  As a moderate Republican, O'Connor tended to approach each case narrowly without seeking to establish sweeping precedents. She most frequently sided with the Court's conservative bloc, having the swing opinion in many decisions. She often wrote concurring opinions that limited the reach of the majority holding. Her majority opinions in landmark cases include Grutter v. Bollinger and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. She also wrote in part the per curiam majority opinion in Bush v.
context_section_description: Initially, O'Connor's voting record aligned closely with the conservative William Rehnquist (voting with him 87% of the time her first three years at the Court). From that time until 1998, O'Connor's alignment with Rehnquist ranged from 93.4% to 63.2%, hitting above 90% in three of those years. In nine of her first sixteen years on the Court, O'Connor voted with Rehnquist more than with any other justice.
  Later on, as the Court's make-up became more conservative (e.g., Anthony Kennedy replacing Lewis Powell, and Clarence Thomas replacing Thurgood Marshall), O'Connor often became the swing vote on the Court. However, she usually disappointed the Court's more liberal bloc in contentious 5–4 decisions: from 1994 to 2004, she joined the traditional conservative bloc of Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Thomas 82 times; she joined the liberal bloc of John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer only 28 times.
  O'Connor's relatively small shift away from conservatives on the Court seems to have been due at least in part to Thomas's views. When Thomas and O'Connor were voting on the same side, she would typically write a separate opinion of her own, refusing to join his. In the 1992 term, O'Connor did not join a single one of Thomas' dissents.
  Some notable cases in which O'Connor joined the majority in a 5-4 decision were:
  McConnell v. FEC, 540 U.S. 93 (2003), upholding the constitutionality of most of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bill regulating "soft money" contributions.
  Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244 (2003), O'Connor wrote the opinion of the Court in Grutter and joined the majority in Gratz. In this pair of cases, the University of Michigan's undergraduate admissions program was held to have engaged in unconstitutional reverse discrimination, but the more-limited type of affirmative action in the University of Michigan Law School's admissions program was held to have been constitutional.
  Lockyer v. Andrade, 538 U.S. 63 (2003): O'Connor wrote the majority opinion, with the four conservative justices concurring, that a 50-year to life sentence without parole for petty shoplifting a few children's videotapes under California's three strikes law was not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment because there was no "clearly established" law to that effect. Leandro Andrade, a Latino nine year Army veteran and father of three, will be eligible for parole in 2046 at age eighty-seven.
  Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002), O'Connor joined the majority holding that the use of school vouchers for religious schools did not violate the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.
  United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549 (1995): O'Connor joined a majority holding unconstitutional the Gun-Free School Zones Act as beyond Congress's Commerce Clause power.
  Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), O'Connor joined with four other justices on December 12, 2000, to rule on the Bush v. Gore case that ceased challenges to the results of the 2000 presidential election (ruling to stop the ongoing Florida election recount and to allow no further recounts). This case effectively ended Gore's hopes to become president. Some legal scholars have argued that she should have recused herself from this case, citing several reports that she became upset when the media initially announced that Gore had won Florida, with her husband explaining that they would have to wait another four years before retiring to Arizona. O'Connor expressed surprise that the decision became controversial. Some people in Washington stopped shaking her hand after the decision, and Arthur Miller confronted her about it at the Kennedy Center.
  O'Connor played an important role in other notable cases, such as:
  Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 492 U.S. 490 (1989): This decision upheld as constitutional state restrictions on second trimester abortions that are not necessary to protect maternal health, contrary to the original trimester requirements in Roe v. Wade. Although O'Conn
caption: Justice O'Connor presents Alberto Gonzales to the audience after swearing him in as U.S. Attorney General, as Becky Gonzales looks on.
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "GWB: 1045: NSC Pre-Brief. Oval Office.", "Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS-1D Mark II", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2005:02:14 14:38:33", "Image Artist": "Paul Morse", "Image WhitePoint": "[313/1000, 329/1000]", "Image PrimaryChromaticities": "[16/25, 33/100, 21/100, 71/100, 3/20, 3/50]", "Image YCbCrCoefficients": "[299/1000, 587/1000, 57/500]", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "494", "Image CustomRendered": "Normal", "Image ExposureMode": "Manual Exposure", "Image WhiteBalance": "Manual", "Image SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "Image Gamma": "11/5", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1226", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6551", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/100", "EXIF FNumber": "14/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Manual", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "800", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2005:02:14 10:02:06", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2005:02:14 10:02:06", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "53/8", "EXIF ApertureValue": "3", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "23", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "841", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "561", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "31750/11", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "2704000/937", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2"}