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 ...