Maveety, Nancy. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: Strategist on the Supreme Court. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996.

Justice O’Connor has provided two memoirs for portions of her life

O’Connor, Sandra. Lazy B. New York: Random House 2002.

A lively account of her girlhood on an Arizona ranch.

O’Connor, Sandra. The Majesty of the Law. New York: Random House 2004.

Reflections on her career as lawyer and jurist.

Wikipedia, whose entries on modern figures must often be used with caution, has quite a balanced piece on Justice O’Connor. You’ll find the links to online versions of many of her opinions as well as many magazine and newspaper articles by and about Justice O’Connor especially useful:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_day_o%27connor

If you’d like to learn more about Justice O’Connor’s home state when she grew up on the Lazy B, you might want to look at:

Melton, Brad, and Dean Smith, Eds. Arizona Goes To War: The Home Front And The Front Lines During World War II. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003.

Thanks to Sandra Day O’Connor and thousands like her, the place of women in the American legal profession has been completely transformed in the decades since she graduated from law school. These books can introduce you to the history of the nation’s female lawyers:

Morello, Karen. The Invisible Bar: The Woman Lawyer in America, 1638 to the Present. New York: Random House, 1986.

Drachman, Virginia G. Sisters in Law: Women Lawyers in Modern America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

These provide background on the world of Arizona politics and government in the decades when Sandra O’Connor began her career in public service:

Smith, Zachary A., Ed. Politics and Public Policy In Arizona. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996.

Iverson, Peter. Barry Goldwater: Native Arizonan. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.

Justice O’Connor’s Supreme Court career spanned the Chief Justiceships of two jurists: Warren Burger and William Rehnquist. The Supreme Court Historical Society’s “History of the Court” is a fine starting point for studying both periods:

http://www.supremecourthistory.org/02_history/subs_history/02_c15.html

http://www.supremecourthistory.org/02_history/subs_history/02_c16.html

If you’d like to delve deeper, I’d suggest some of these books:

For the Burger Court:

Maltz, Earl M. The Chief Justiceship of Warren Burger, 1969-1986. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.

Yarbrough, Tinsley E. The Burger Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000.

And for the Court’s Rehnquist years:

Belsky, Martin H., Ed. The Rehnquist Court: A Retrospective. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Gottlieb, Stephen E. Morality Imposed: The Rehnquist Court and Liberty in America. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

Keck, Thomas Moylan. The Most Activist Supreme Court in History: The Road to Modern Judicial Conservatism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Maltz, Earl M., Ed. Rehnquist Justice: Understanding the Court Dynamic. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2003.

Tushnet, Mark V. A Court Divided: The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law. New York: W.W. Norton Co., 2005.

Yarbrough, Tinsley E. The Rehnquist Court And The Constitution. Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

On the web, Stanford Law School’s Stanford Lawyer Website includes of a September 2005 roundtable discussion of the Rehnquist Court from the alumni magazine that was the alma matter of both Justices O’Connor and Rehnquist:

http://www.law.stanford.edu/publications/
stanford_lawyer/issues/72/sl72_TheRehnquistCourt.pdf

You’ll find some helpful material in earlier issues of History Now as well:

“Women in American Politics in the Twentieth Century” by Sara Evans in our March 2006 issue:
/historynow/03_2006/historian6.php

And Virginia Scharff’s “Women of the West” in the September 2006 issue:
/historynow/09_2006/historian5.php

I can’t close without recommending two personal favorites. Both are geared to younger readers. First, Justice O’Connor’s delightful children’s book Chico (New York: Dutton, 2005) relating a childhood adventure involving her beloved pony, a newborn calf, and a rattlesnake. Finally, a wonderful book by Lisa Tucker McElroy (in collaboration with the Justice’s granddaughter, Courtney O’Connor), Meet My Grandmother: She's a Supreme Court Justice (Brookfield, CT: Milbrook Press, 1999).