In 1979, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong could publish a book about the Supreme Court and title it The Brethren. Justice O’Connor’s appointment changed that, and so much else.

Justice O’Connor was a first, of course: the first women to sit on the Court. But, at least for now, she was also a last: the last Justice to have held elective public office (as a state senator, and first female majority leader of a state senate). Her political experience was reflected in her sophisticated opinions—sometimes for the Court and sometimes in separate writing—regarding pivotal issues in the law of democracy, ranging from political gerrymandering to minority vote dilution to excessive race consciousness in the political process. (And in a delightful article on The History of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 49 Vand. L. Rev. 657 (1996).)

Justice O’Connor understood the difference that her presence on the Supreme Court made, not only because she was so often the swing vote, but because she was a woman. She was too politic to say this directly, but her tribute to her colleague Thurgood Marshall (Thurgood Marshall: The Influence of a Raconteur, 44 Stan. L. Rev. 1217 (1992)) elegantly made the point.

And that point came through especially in Justice O’Connor’s influential, but now regrettably abandoned, opinion for the Court in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 UU.S. 306 (2003), which upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action plan with these words:

In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity. All members of our heterogeneous society must have confidence in the openness and integrity of the educational institutions that provide this training.

It is a measure of what we have lost that the current Court has turned its back both on her work with respect to affirmative action and with respect to women’s right to control the decisions whether and when to bear a child. But her work will not be forgotten.