Yesterday, retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, released a letter announcing that she has been diagnosed with dementia and is withdrawing from public life. Amy Howe has this blog’s coverage, which first appeared at Howe on the Court. Additional coverage comes from Jessica Gresko at the Associated Press, Nina Totenberg at NPR, Lawrence Hurley at Reuters, Ariane de Vogue and Veronica Stracqualursi at CNN, Richard Wolf for USA Today, Robert Barnes for The Washington Post, Greg Stohr at Bloomberg, Mark Walsh at Education Week’s School Law Blog, and Jess Bravin for The Wall Street Journal, who reports that “[t]he greatest legacy [O’Connor] hoped to leave, she said, was a renewed commitment to civics education, her principal cause since stepping down from the high court in 2006.”
For The New York Times, Adam Liptak reports that as O’Connor “exits the public stage, so does the kind of figure once familiar in American political and judicial circles: a moderate Republican ready to find compromise and common ground.” Joan Biskupic writes for CNN that, after previously going public about her battle with breast cancer and the effects of her husband’s Alzheimer’s disease, O’Connor has “again surmounted the stigma that sometimes comes with illness.” At The National Law Journal (subscription or registration required), Tony Mauro reports that before O’Connor made her announcement, she “gave her newly retired colleague Anthony Kennedy a gift of sorts: her chambers,” “a gesture that affirmed the camaraderie and traditions that keep the court collegial, most of the time.”
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