After a long battle with dementia, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor died Friday at the age of 93. The trailblazing jurist was the first woman nominated and confirmed to the country’s highest court.

Vin Bonventre, distinguished professor of law at Albany Law School and editor of the NY Court Watcher blog, told Capital Tonight that the justice could’ve been considered the “most powerful person in America” during her time on the bench.

Prior to becoming the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, O’Connor served in the Arizona state Senate for six years and eventually served as the chamber’s majority leader, becoming the first woman to serve in that role in any state. After her time in the Senate and as a Maricopa County Superior Court judge, O’Connor moved on to Arizona’s highest court, the Court of Appeals.

During his first successful run for the presidency in 1980, Ronald Reagan made a campaign promise to nominate a woman. Following the retirement of Justice Potter Stewart, Reagan completed that campaign promise by nominating O’Connor to the country’s highest court. Bonventre said that the nomination was deemed “controversial by some Republicans” due to concerns about O’Connor’s views on abortion. Despite that, O’Connor was confirmed in a 99-0 vote.

Despite being a conservative and being nominated by a conservative president, O’Connor was seen as a swing vote who helped sway the court’s opinion on a variety of issues from abortion to affirmative action and more.

O’Connor served on the Supreme Court for nearly two and a half decades until she decided to retire in 2005 and eventually left the court after her successor, Samuel Alito, was confirmed by the Senate in 2006.

O’Connor was born just 10 years after the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which granted suffrage to women, was ratified. At the time of her passing, the Supreme Court, where O’Connor smashed the judicial glass ceiling, had four women serving out of the nine justices on the court. However, Bonventre said O’Connor’s lasting legacy will be her “constitutional realism," which is seeing the nearly 250-year-old document and its impact on modern life.