Entry Details

About the Entry

Category: 
Print > Special Issue or Supplement > Central

Title of entry: 
Her Honor's Legacy: Sandra Day O'Connor

Issue or Publication date:
December 2024

Publication name: 
Arizona Attorney Magazine

View Website home page:
https://azbar.org/news-publications/arizona-attorney-magazine/

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Entry Essay: 
Arizona Attorney is a monthly magazine serving the legal profession. Our readers are primarily lawyers, judges and law professors, but our subscribers include many others in the legal industry, both in the state and across the country. Readers turn to us for news about cases and controversies, but also for feature articles; history pieces; newsmaker profiles; and data and trend stories that affect their bottom line.
Our December 2024 issue was nearly a year in the making, and it features a remarkable amount of reader-provided content – which requires a remarkable amount of professional work by magazine staffers to feature admirably.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was an Arizona lawyer and judge – and thus a subscriber to our magazine. As the first woman ever named to the U.S. Supreme Court, she was a historic figure, but in Arizona she also was a colleague and much-loved friend. When she died in December 2023, we began issuing calls for anecdotes, memories, images and longer stories that illustrated her legacy and lesser-known sides of her personality.

We didn’t know what we would get, but throughout 2024, we issued multiple calls for content across different products and media. We ultimately published the content of about 60 lawyers, judges and others. The outpouring surprised even us – and created challenges.

Many of the authors had never drafted an essay, and they required deep editing that also let individual voices resonate. Images that were provided fell across a wide range of quality, but each selected image provided heartwarming insight into the subject. Because people wrote across time periods, we had an organizational challenge to find a way for readers to be carried on a narrative journey even as authors leaped back and forth across decades.

The result of that hard work and strategizing is noteworthy and led to a tremendous outpouring of reader appreciation. We edited each piece and slotted them in what we felt was a sensible order, creating conceptual section headings to assist reader comprehension. Our Art Director also sought out and secured historic images, via Getty and elsewhere, to round out the special issue and help readers feel at home with professional photos, some of which they had seen before, and others – like the one of the Justice at home that opens the special section – that may have surprised them in their intimacy.

We feel the effort paid off and that we achieved our goal – to let those who knew Justice O‘Connor tell their stories in ways that national publications simply could not, and to do so in a way that these occasional authors could be proud of their contributions and marvel at their narrative impact. As numerous readers told us, thank you for this amazing keepsake issue.