I grew up in different circumstances than probably most of you young people did. I grew up on a cattle ranch that was in Arizona and New Mexico, and I spent my childhood in a very remote place. We didn't have other children around. I did a lot of horseback riding and the whole family had to get out and help on the ranch. We learned to be pretty independent that way, I think. If something had to be done, there wasn't any repair person you could call to do it. If the car broke, you had to fix it. If you needed to add on to your house, you had to do it yourself. If the cattle were sick, you had to try to nurse them back to health. So, we learned early on how to try to be independent and make things better.

When I was young, I was your age, I wanted to be a cattle rancher because that's all I knew how to do. And I still think it's a wonderful way of life, but it's not a way of life very many people in our country can enjoy today. There aren't that many ranches, and people tend to live in cities, in urban areas.

And eventually I had to go away to school because there weren't any schools near the ranch. I lived with my grandmother in El Paso, Texas, and my grandmother was a very independent woman, too. She used to tell me that I could do anything that I wanted to do when I grew up. It was just very clear to her there should be no barriers in what her granddaughter could do. I grew up listening to that, and I guess I thought it must be true.

I went through school and eventually went to Stanford University and then to Stanford Law School. I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and even when I went to law school, I never thought about being on the US Supreme Court. I tended to focus more on more immediate objectives: what could be my first job? What kind of a job could I get? Once I got a job, I wanted to do as good a job with it as I could in hopes that someday there would be some other opportunities that would come along, and sure enough, there were.

I have found that I have been able to work always at jobs that I thought were interesting. I didn't work--ever--for the money but more for what kind of work it would be. I always knew that I wanted to work in my life--that was clear. I just didn't know what direction it was going to take. I think that young people your age today have so many more options than we did when I grew up. And there should be no barrier for any of you to decide which direction you want to go and which path to follow.

I never planned to be a Supreme Court Justice; that was never my goal. I was working as a judge in my home state of Arizona when I was nominated for the Supreme Court. It's very unlikely that you will be selected for the Supreme Court. I thought it was extremely unlikely that a ranch girl from Arizona would be selected. And I was very happy with my life in Arizona. I liked my judicial work there; I liked my life in an adobe house on the desert. My husband and our children were happily together with me in that house, and we enjoyed our life in Arizona.

So it was a surprise to me when the nomination came. It came perhaps because the President had decided it was time to put a woman on the Supreme Court. We'd had a Supreme Court for 191 years and no woman had been put on the Court. So it was a bit overdue, don't you think? When the President started looking around, he eventually focused on some women in the country who had been very active in their lives, who had shown some promise of legal scholarship, and who'd had some judicial experience. I fitted that category and was one of those considered, and eventually the President asked me to serve. No one was more surprised than I was.

Judges are supposed to be objective; they're supposed to study and look at the law and apply the law to the particular case in an objective way, not from any particular point of view. So does being a woman make a difference in what answer is given? I tend to think that probably at the end of the day, a wise old woman and a wise old man are going to reach the same answer.