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The Honorable Sandra Day O’Connor, who shattered the glass ceiling in 1981 as the first female to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, passed away on Friday, December 1 at age 93. Like the incomparable former First Lady Rosalyn Carter, Justice O’Connor died from complications related to dementia. She served on the Supreme Court for 25 years before retiring in 2006 to care for her husband, who was, coincidentally, suffering from dementia at the time.

Sandra Day was born on August 26, 1930 in El Paso, TX. Her parents owned a 180,000-acre cattle ranch called The Lazy B in southeastern Arizona. She attended Stanford University at age 16 and enrolled in Stanford Law School at 19 as the only woman in her class. Her decision to become a lawyer was partly inspired by her father and a lawsuit that her family ranch was involved in for a decade. In addition to being the first female associate justice, Justice O’Connor was named the Republican majority leader in the California State Senate in 1973, making her the first woman to hold a majority leader position in the United States. She was also a mother-of-three, a breast cancer survivor, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by President Obama in 2009.

Sandra Day O’Connor, appointed as the nation’s first female Supreme Court justice in 1981, died in Phoenix, Arizona, on Friday morning. She was 93. The court announced her death in a statement, citing “complications related to advanced dementia, probably Alzheimer’s, and a respiratory illness.”

In October 2018, O’Connor’s family released a letter from the 24-year Supreme Court veteran announcing that she had dementia and was “no longer able to participate in public life.”

“How fortunate I feel to be an American and to have been presented with the remarkable opportunities available to the citizens of our country,” she wrote. “As a young cowgirl from the Arizona desert, I never could have imagined that one day I would become the first woman justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.”

O’Connor became known as a moderate conservative with an open-minded approach that often times made her a swing vote. She was tough on law and order issues, but also supported abortion rights.

“She was an amazing trailblazer, firm, knew what she wanted and didn’t hesitate,” Lise Earle Beske, a law clerk of O’Connor’s from 1994 to ’95, tells PEOPLE. Beske said that O’Connor seemed to hire clerks from all points on the political spectrum because she wanted every viewpoint vigorously represented before she reached a decision on a case.

“She was a very, very strong person,” Beske says. “Steely at times, but someone who you also wanted to please.”

In 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts called O’Connor “a towering figure” who “broke down barriers for women in the legal profession to the betterment of that profession and the country as a whole.”

One of O’Connor’s most consequential decisions was a vote to stop a Florida recount following the razor-close 2000 presidential election, with the majority of justices deciding that George W. Bush would become president.

[From People]

As a now almost-extinct “moderate” Republican, Justice O’Connor was criticized as lacking a “clear judicial philosophy,” something she defended by saying her decisions were made on a case-by-case approach. Justice O’Connor was the swing vote against an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade in 1992 (Planned Parenthood v. Casey) and in striking down state limits on “partial-birth” abortions in 2000 (Stenberg v. Carhart), In 2003, she wrote the majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, which decided that affirmative action did not violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. And although many people on the left considered it too little, too late, Justice O’Connor expressed regret over the Court getting involved in Bush v. Gore, saying, “Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye.’ It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.”

On a more gossipy front, Justice O’Connor dated future Chief Justice William Rehnquist, then 26, during her first year at Stanford Law. After they broke up mid-way through her second year, she began dating her future husband John Jay O’Connor. But 40 days into that relationship, Rehnquist wrote her a letter proposing marriage. It was one of four proposals she’d receive during law school, before getting engaged to John in 1952. Justice O’Connor lived a full life in which the decisions she made mattered in the lives she was making them for. We send our condolences to her family.

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