TU Law Professors Lyn Entzeroth, Tamara Piety, and Judith Royster, and Misty Cooper Watt, a third-year law student and editor-in-chief of the Tulsa Law Review, served as panelists for the event, titled “A Life in the Law.” More than seven hundred people attended the free question-and-answer format program, which was moderated by Judge Robert H. Henry of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit.

President Ronald Reagan appointed O’Connor as the first woman to the Supreme Court in 1981. Throughout her 25-year tenure on the Court, O’Connor was known for her pragmatic opinions and for her attempts to foster friendship between members of the Court.

She brought to her position stamina and perseverance, traits she gleaned from ranch duties in her early days out West. In many ways, her experience with ranch work seemed to help her weather the challenging road toward becoming the first female Supreme Court justice.

“Anyone who has spent any time on a ranch knows that help is needed from everybody, male and female, to make it go,” O’Connor said. “Nobody who asks you to do a job cares one bit about whether you’re male or female. They just want the job done and they want it done right.”

Since retiring from the Court in 2006, O’Connor has continued her public service as a member of the Iraq Study Commission, created at the suggestion of former Secretary of State James Baker III and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. She also remains an advocate of an independent federal judiciary and often speaks out against broadly based criticisms of the nation’s federal and state courts.

“It isn’t that independence means a judge should be entitled to do any crazy thing they want to do,” she said. “It means that the role of a judge in deciding a case should enable a judge to, with the best of his or her ability, resolve the legal issues in a case fairly and impartially.”

When asked whether she might do anything differently if she could return to her seat on the Court, O’Connor responded by stating her position both in law and in life: “Do the best you can on the front end and don’t look back.”