ABSTRACT
Sandra Day O'Connor took her oath of office as a justice on the US Supreme Court on September 25, 1981, under the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Sandra Day went to school in El Paso, living with her maternal grandmother, attending first the private Radford School for Girls, then public high school. She learned John Maynard Keynes's theory of public finance, a theory inconsistent with her dad's "pay-as-you-go" style of ranching. While O'Connor's husband was busy finishing law school, she studied for the California bar exam. Political scientists discount any claim that the Court's justices decide a case purely by canons of legal reasoning, including adherence to precedent. In this context, scholars might classify Justice O'Connor as predictably motivated to vote ideologically in a moderate conservative way, which means her vote sometimes swings to accommodate a more liberal public policy preference.
