1 gen 1981 anni - Reagan appoints Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court

Descrizione:

Even if he did not deliver everything he promised, Reagan left an indelible imprint on politics, public policy, and American culture. The federal judiciary was remade by Reagan and his attorney general, Edwin Meese, to push out the liberal judicial philosophy that had prevailed since the 1950s. During his two terms, Reagan appointed 368 federal court judges — most of them with conservative credentials — and three Supreme Court justices: Sandra Day O’Connor (1981), Antonin Scalia (1986), and Anthony Kennedy (1988). Ironically, O’Connor and Kennedy proved far less devoted to New Right conservatism than Reagan and his supporters imagined. O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Court, became a swing vote between liberals and conservatives. Kennedy also emerged as a judicial moderate, leaving Scalia as Reagan’s only genuinely conservative appointee.


In 1981, Sandra Day O’Connor, pictured here, was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan, the first woman to serve on the Court. In 1993, she was joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an appointee of President Bill Clinton. O’Connor emerged as a leader of the moderate bloc on the Court during the 1990s; she retired in 2006. President Barack Obama appointed two women to the court, Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena Kagan in 2010.


But Reagan also elevated Justice William Rehnquist, a conservative Nixon appointee, to the position of chief justice. Under Rehnquist’s leadership (1986–2005), the Court’s conservatives took an activist stance, limiting the reach of federal laws, ending court-ordered busing, and endorsing constitutional protection of property rights. However, on controversial issues such as individual liberties, abortion rights, affirmative action, and the rights of criminal defendants, the presence of O’Connor swung the Court to a more centrist position. Under Rehnquist, the Supreme Court scaled back, but did not usually overturn, the liberal rulings of the Warren and Burger Courts. In the controversial Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), for instance, Scalia pushed for the justices to overturn the abortion-rights decision of Roe v. Wade (1973). O’Connor refused, but she nonetheless approved the constitutional validity of state laws limiting the use of public funds and facilities for abortions. Centrists prevailed on only a handful of major issues, however, and the ideological tilt rightward of the federal judiciary would prove a significant institutional legacy of the Reagan presidency.

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