In choosing Sandra Day O’Connor to receive the 1998 Cosmos Club Award, the Club honors one who has played a unique role in establishing the right of women to serve at the highest level of the law and in the nation.
In her own experience, Mrs. O’Connor, the first woman to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, has demonstrated how long was the road to travel. Although she was a magna cum laude graduate in economics from Stanford University, although she was chosen for the prestigious position of staff member on the Stanford University law school review, and although she graduated third in her law school class of I 02 students, she was refused employment as an associate in a succession of California law firms, finally being offered a secretarial position.
With patient good humor and quiet self confidence, Mrs. O’Connor was undeterred. Returning to her home state of Arizona, she was elected to the State Senate, rising to become the majority leader, the first woman to fill that role anywhere in the country. Appointed to the state Court of Appeals, she was tapped to be the first woman to serve in the annual British-American judicial exchange program, in which judges visit Lon- don and Washington on alternate years to draw lessons from how the application of the common law has evolved on the two sides of the Atlantic since American independence. When President Reagan resolved to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor was his choice. Now the third ranking member of the high Court, serving at the side of her former Stanford law review fellow editor, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, Sandra O’Connor has demonstrated the wisdom of the confidence which was placed in her.
