Lady Justice
Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the LA Times Book Prize in Current Interest
An instant New York Times Bestseller!
“Stirring…Lithwick’s approach, interweaving interviews with legal commentary, allows her subjects to shine...Inspiring.”—New York Times Book Review
“In Dahlia Lithwick’s urgent, engaging Lady Justice, Dobbs serves as a devastating bookend to a story that begins in hope.”—Boston Globe
Dahlia Lithwick, one of the nation’s foremost legal commentators, tells the gripping and heroic story of the women lawyers who fought the racism, sexism, and xenophobia of Donald Trump’s presidency—and won
After the sudden shock of Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, many Americans felt lost and uncertain. It was clear he and his administration were going to pursue a series of retrograde, devastating policies. What could be done?
Immediately, women lawyers all around the country, independently of each other, sprang into action, and they had a common goal: they weren’t going to stand by in the face of injustice, while Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the Republican party did everything in their power to remake the judiciary in their own conservative image. Over the next four years, the women worked tirelessly to hold the line against the most chaotic and malign presidency in living memory. There was Sally Yates, the acting attorney general of the United States, who refused to sign off on the Muslim travel ban. And Becca Heller, the founder of a refugee assistance program who brought the fight over the travel ban to the airports. And Roberta Kaplan, the famed commercial litigator, who sued the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. And, of course, Stacey Abrams, whose efforts to protect the voting rights of millions of Georgians may well have been what won the Senate for the Democrats in 2020.
These are just a handful of the stories Lithwick dramatizes in thrilling detail to tell a brand-new and deeply inspiring account of the Trump years. With unparalleled access to her subjects, she has written a luminous book, not about the villains of the Trump years, but about the heroes. And as the country confronts the news that the Supreme Court, which includes three Trump-appointed justices, will soon overturn Roe v. Wade, Lithwick shines a light on not only the major consequences of such a decision, but issues a clarion call to all who might, like the women in this book, feel the urgency to join the fight. A celebration of the tireless efforts, legal ingenuity, and indefatigable spirit of the women whose work all too often went unrecognized at the time, Lady Justice is destined to be treasured and passed from hand to hand for generations to come, not just among lawyers and law students, but among all optimistic and hopeful Americans.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Slate legal correspondent Lithwick (coauthor, Me v. Everybody) takes an incisive if uneven look at women who responded to Donald Trump's election by "upending their lives and their careers and their families to organize a new kind of resistance movement." Theorizing that women have a "special relationship" with the law because it is "the most conventional way with which to effect radical change," Lithwick profiles, among others, former acting attorney general Sally Yates, who was fired for refusing to defend Trump's executive order targeting Muslim travelers, and Robbie Kaplan, a "Jewish, gay, brash commercial litigator from New York City" who won a $26 million lawsuit against the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Though the profiles are full of sharp observations and astute analyses of legal matters, Lithwick's focus on individual attorneys and activists inadvertently echoes the "Great Man" theory of social change she thinks Americans are "too apt to succumb to." Much stronger, if more depressing, are the sections she devotes to her own story of sexual harassment by a federal judge and her sense of complicity in upholding "the culture of silence in the legal profession." Despite its flaws, this evocative study captures the power and fragility of the rule of law.
Customer Reviews
Required Reading
A beautiful, elegantly written book about the grave challenges facing our democracy and the extraordinary women who have done/are doing everything they can to save it.
And please — make Lithwick’s podcast Amicus a regular listen. She’s so smart and thoughtful about the how the law does and can shape our world. It’s indispensable.