A life well lived: Albuquerque attorney remembers straight-talking Sandra Day O'Connor

Albuquerque attorney Roberta Cooper Ramo was driving to her law office when she heard on the car radio that Sandra Day O’Connor had died.

“My first reaction was that I was relieved for her, because I knew that she — more than anyone — would not want to be in a diminished state,” Ramo said.

O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court, died on Friday at age 93 of complications of dementia.

“But my deepest hope is that our country, so polarized today, will remember her as someone who understood that compromise is the essence of a working democracy,” Ramo said. “As we look at her life, I hope that causes us to remember that specific virtue.”

Facts at hand

Ramo, a lawyer with the Modrall Sperling firm, was the first woman president of the American Bar Association, 1995-1996, and president of The American Law Institute, 2008-2017.

She said she first met O’Connor in 1993 or 1994 when a New York organization asked her to interview the Supreme Court justice at an event in New York City.

The two women had a lot in common. Each had faced discrimination because of her gender when trying to launch their legal careers, and both were Westerners.

Ramo’s father was chairman of a Western clothing-store chain based in Albuquerque, and O’Connor’s father was a rancher whose Lazy B spread straddled the New Mexico and Arizona border.

O’Connor grew up in a ranch house a mile west of the New Mexico border, but she was as familiar with New Mexico towns such as Lordsburg and Silver City as any place in Arizona.

“She reminded me of so many New Mexico ranch women, straightforward, happy to meet you,” Ramo said. “She had no arrogance about her at all. At the same time, it never occurred to her that there was anything she couldn’t do because she was a woman.”

Ramo and O’Connor worked with each other in places as far away as London and Ukraine, but Ramo said the last time she saw O’Connor was in New Mexico, just after O’Connor retired from the Supreme Court in 2006.

“I think it was in Santa Fe,” Ramo said. “We were having a cup of coffee, and I was telling her how much I appreciated everything she had done. Then we just started talking about people we both knew.”

She said O’Connor had friends in New Mexico, attended the opera in Santa Fe and sometimes enjoyed riding horses near the capital city.

“When she called me, she would say, ‘Roberta, this is Sandra,’ in this ranchwoman voice. I would always stand up when she phoned because I had such respect for her. She’d say, ‘Roberta, sit down.’”

Ramo said O’Connor herself suggested that Ramo interview her at that New York City event in the early 1990s, even though the two had not met at the time.

“I think she may have picked me because I had been nominated to be American Bar Association president,” Ramo said.

She said her law partners at the time teased her because, in preparation for the interview, she read all of O’Connor’s Supreme Court decisions.

“I was impressed by the quality and the straightforward way she wrote her judicial opinions, the way she set out the legal architecture of her opinion,” Ramo said.

Just after Leonid Kuchma was elected to the presidency of Ukraine in 1994, O’Connor and Ramo met with him. Ramo said Kuchma showed them the Ukraine constitution, a rather lengthy document that he had had translated into English.

“Justice O’Connor held up the slim U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, which she had brought with her, and told (Kuchma), ‘My job every day is to make sure this is applied to the facts at hand.’”

High expectations

Ramo said that having served in the Arizona Senate, O’Connor had a keen appreciation for the need to compromise, but she also “knew a long time ago that (the American) people did not understand our constitution or their civic responsibilities.

“She started a foundation, iCivics, to ensure every student receives a high-quality civic education and becomes engaged in and beyond the classroom,” Ramo said

iCivics, a nonprofit founded in 2009, provides educational online games and lesson plans to promote civics education.

Ramo said O’Connor also realized the importance of interaction with people.

In 2000, Ramo and O’Connor were in London for a joint meeting of the American and British bars. Ramo’s daughter, Jennifer, now an attorney herself, was also there.

“Justice O’Connor called me and said she had an extra ticket to the theater, a musical, and wanted to know if Jennifer would like to go,” Ramo said. “She knew how much it would mean to a young woman to spend time with a Supreme Court justice.

“She had high expectations for herself and everyone around her, and we were all elevated by her life, a patriotic life, well lived.”