Sandra Day O'Connor

Five of her ten planets are cardinal and only one is fixed. Fire and water take three each, with two apiece in earth and air. The Sun, Venus and Uranus fill twelve degrees of Aries, and Mercury sits twenty three arcminutes from the end of Pisces. The record calls O'Connor the first woman on the Supreme Court and, for most of her twenty five years, the vote that decided which way it went, and says she graduated third in her class and was offered work as a legal secretary.

One fixed planet, with five cardinal, is the balance to take from this chart, and in a judge it reads as an inverse. Fixed is the mode that holds a position, and a court is an institution built on holding them. A chart with almost nothing fixed in it belongs to somebody who starts and adjusts rather than to somebody who stays put, and the record's central fact is a person who decided which way a thing went for twenty five years running.

Jupiter lies at an awkward angle to Saturn at under half a degree, and the reading is expansion against caution: the swing between taking too much on and taking nothing on, and timing that is repeatedly slightly wrong. For a judge the record describes as the deciding vote, a contact whose own word is swing is a coincidence of vocabulary worth one sentence, and the reading is about a person's habits rather than about a court's arithmetic. Saturn also sits square Uranus at a third of a degree, order against revolt, which is a slow pair shared with everybody born across those months.

Jupiter sits sixty degrees from Uranus at a tenth of a degree, the closest usable contact here, fortunate change: being in the right place when something shifts. Venus sits square Pluto at under a quarter, love and control. Her Moon sits on the twenty seventh degree of Aquarius at noon with Pisces still possible, so it is left out, and that costs the tightest contact in the chart. The record's last fact, a woman who finished third in her class and was offered a secretarial job, is here because the record put it there, and nothing in these ten planets contains or explains the offer. Neptune and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. She died at Phoenix on 1 December 2023, at ninety three. Mars stood in easy contact with her natal Sun at thirteen hundredths of a degree that day and Saturn opposite her natal Neptune at under a fifth. The Moon was disseminating and eighty one per cent lit.