Lady Justice
Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America
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4.0 • 5 Ratings
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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
In the immediate aftershocks of Donald Trump’s victory over Hilary Clinton in 2016, women lawyers across the country, independently of one another, sprang into action. They were determined not to stand by while the Republican party did everything in their power to pursue devastating and often retrograde policies.
In Lady Justice, Dahlia Lithwick, one of the nation’s foremost legal commentators, illuminates these many heroes of the Trump years. From Sally Yates and Becca Heller, who fought the Muslim travel ban, to Roberta Kaplan, who sued the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, to Stacey Abrams, who worked to protect the voting rights of millions of Georgians, Lithwick dramatizes in thrilling detail the women lawyers who worked tirelessly to hold the line against the most chaotic presidency in living memory.
A celebration of the 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.
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.