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On June 21, 2004, I had the distinct honor of meeting one of my mentors after having been sworn in to the Supreme Court of the United States. In1981 Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman to serve as a justice in the 191-year history of the Supreme Court of the United States. President Ronald Reagan nominated Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court on July 7, 1981. In September of 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor became the Supreme Court's 102 justice and the first female member.

Justice O'Connor proved to have a more moderate judicial philosophy than many anticipated. O'Connor received her law degree from Stanford in 1952. Upon graduation, she was at the top of her class, graduating third in a class of 102 students. O'Connor was just two places behind another future Supreme Court justice, William H. Rehnquist. Leading up to her appointment onto the Supreme Court, O'Connor had been the senate majority leader of the Arizona Senate, and was a Judge in the Arizona Court of Appeals.

One year into Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Court tenure, she authored one of her most famous opinions in Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan (1982). In this decision, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for a state nursing school to refuse to admit men. In a 1992 case against abortion rights, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, O'Connor was one of the majority who voted to keep abortion legal for women. In Bush v. Gore (2000), she joined the majority, ruling that the Florida recount should not continue. In July of 2005, Sandra Day O'Connor retired from the court, having served 24 terms as a Supreme Court Justice.

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On June 21, 2004, after having been sworn into the United States Supreme Court, I had the fortunate opportunity to meet Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg was sworn into the Supreme Court in 1993. Appointed by President Bill Clinton, Ruth Ginsburg became the first Jewish female member in Supreme Court history. She attended Harvard Law School, and then transferred to Columbia Law School, graduating in 1959. She clerked in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, taught at Rutgers Law School (1963-72), and became (1972) the first woman full professor at Columbia. During the 1970s, as general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Women's Rights Project, she argued a series of cases before the Supreme Court that strengthened constitutional safeguards of sexual equality; she has been called the "Thurgood Marshall of women's rights." In 1980, President Carter nominated her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

As a Supreme Court Justice, Ginsburg authored the famous court opinion in United States v. Virginia (1996), ruling the Virginia Military Institute failed to show "exceedingly persuasive justification" for its male-only admission policy and was therefore violating the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Olmstead v. L.C., (1999), Ginsburg authored the opinion, expanding the rights of mentally ill people under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Ginsburg also wrote the landmark ruling in Friends of the Earth, Inc. et al. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services, Inc., (2000) Giving private citizens standing, under the Clean Water Act, to sue environmental polluters.

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