She grew up nine miles from the nearest paved road on a 198,000-acre Arizona cattle ranch with no electricity until age seven, fixing tractors and shooting jackrabbits with a .22. She entered Stanford at 16 and finished law school near the top of her class, and no firm would hire her for pay because she was a woman. So Sandra Day O'Connor offered to work for free, sharing a desk with a secretary, and kept solving problems the way the ranch taught her: with the tools at hand.

This episode follows the pragmatist's path from the Lazy B to the first female state Senate majority leader in the country, through the weight of a trial judge's docket, to Reagan's 1981 nomination and a quarter century as the Supreme Court's center of gravity. It closes with her unexpected final act, building the iCivics video game platform to teach kids how government works, and the haunting doubt she carried about being the first.

• Ranch logic: how fixing fences in the desert became a judicial philosophy
• Top of her Stanford class, working for free: the closed door she walked around instead of through
• The trial judge's burden: the Clarence Dixon case and what real-world stakes do to ideology
• Swing vote and center of gravity: 24 years as the most consequential moderate in American law
• Why a retired justice built video games for middle schoolers, and her fear about who would come after