by Amy Matsui, Senior Counsel,
National Women's Law Center
Former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is “disappointed” that some of her rulings have been dismantled by the Roberts Court. I think we’re thinking what she’s thinking.
Justice O’Connor was asked during a panel discussion over the weekend how she felt “about the fact that the current Court had undone some of her rulings.” It’s not clear which decisions she or the questioner had in mind, but we can think of at least one that she wrote -– the 2003 opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, which upheld the right of public universities to use affirmative action in their admissions policies to promote diversity -– and one in which she was a key vote -– the 2000 decision in Stenberg v. Carhart, which struck down a government restriction on a woman’s access to abortion in part because it lacked an exception to protect the woman’s health -- that have been seriously undermined by subsequent Roberts Court decisions. In any event, Justice O’Connor did not question the proposition that at least some of her rulings had been “dismantled” and said that it would be understandable for her to feel “disappointed.”
In addition, Justice O’Connor was a strong proponent of “the value of diversity of the bench” during this panel. She noted that having two women on the Supreme Court (Justice Ginsburg and now Justice Sonia Sotomayor) “isn’t enough.”


