Ruth Bader Ginsburg
a life
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
The definitive account of an icon who shaped gender equality for all women.
In this comprehensive, revelatory biography — fifteen years of
interviews and research in the making — historian Jane Sherron De Hart
explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg’s
passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, and her
meticulous jurisprudence. At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs
was her Jewish background, specifically the concept of tikkun olam, the
Hebrew injunction to ‘repair the world’, with its profound meaning for a
young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II.
Ruth’s journey began with her mother, who died tragically young but
whose intellect inspired her daughter’s feminism. It stretches from
Ruth’s days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School
to Cornell University to Harvard and Columbia Law Schools; to becoming
one of the first female law professors in the country and having to
fight for equal pay and hide her second pregnancy to avoid losing her
job; to becoming the director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and
arguing momentous anti-sex-discrimination cases before the US Supreme
Court.
All this, even before being nominated in 1993 to become the second woman
on the Court, where her crucial decisions and dissents are still making
history. Intimately, personably told, this biography offers
unprecedented insight into a pioneering life and legal career whose
profound impact will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and
beyond.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
De Hart, a professor emerita of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, offers a laudatory biography of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. De Hart, who had Ginsburg's cooperation, pays appropriate attention both to the experiences that informed Ginsburg's passion for justice and to her personal life, highlighting her lifelong love affair with her husband and her friendships with professional colleagues, including her ideological opposite Antonin Scalia. De Hart's great strength is her ability to explain Ginsburg's cases and the legal strategies she employed, for example, to convince the Supreme Court to apply the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution to strike down laws that discriminate on the basis of gender. De Hart clearly and accessibly lays out background information, the various legal theories employed, and the judges' holdings. She also demonstrates Ginsburg's far-reaching influence as the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court, in 1993, taking readers into the inner workings of the court as Ginsburg and other justices war over the defining legal and cultural issues of the era abortion rights, marriage equality, race, and religion. Readers will find this an insightful, fascinating, and admiring biography of one of America's most extraordinary jurists.
