Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life

by Jane Sherron de Hart

Overview

The first full life—private, public, legal, philosophical—of the 107th Supreme Court Justice, one of the most profound and profoundly transformative legal minds of our time; a book fifteen years in work, written with the cooperation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself and based on many interviews with the justice, her husband, her children, her friends, and her associates.

In this large, comprehensive, revelatory biography, Jane De Hart explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg’s passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, her meticulous jurisprudence: her desire to make We the People more united and our union more perfect. At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs—her Jewish background. 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. We see the influence of her mother, Celia Amster Bader, whose intellect inspired her daughter’s feminism, insisting that Ruth become independent, as she witnessed her mother coping with terminal cervical cancer (Celia died the day before Ruth, at seventeen, graduated from high school).
     From Ruth’s days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School, to Cornell University, Harvard and Columbia Law Schools (first in her class), to being a law professor at Rutgers University (one of the few women in the field and fighting pay discrimination), hiding her second pregnancy so as not to risk losing her job; founding the Women's Rights Law Reporter, writing the brief for the first case that persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down a sex-discriminatory state law, then at Columbia (the law school’s first tenured female professor); becoming the director of the women’s rights project of the ACLU, persuading the Supreme Court in a series of decisions to ban laws that denied women full citizenship status with men.
     Her years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, deciding cases the way she played golf, as she, left-handed, played with right-handed clubs—aiming left, swinging right, hitting down the middle. Her years on the Supreme Court . . . 
     A pioneering life and legal career whose profound mark on American jurisprudence, on American society, on our American character and spirit, will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and beyond.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400040483
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/16/2018
Pages:	752
Sales rank:	19,037
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Jane Sherron De Hart is professor emerita of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She lives in Santa Barbara, California.

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Table of Contents

Preface: An American Icon v

Part I Becoming Ruth

1 Celia's Daughter 3

2 Cornell and Marty 30

3 Learning the Law on Male Turf 55

4 Sailing in "Uncharted Waters" 78

5 The Making of a Feminist Advocate 104

6 Seizing the Moment 123

Part II Mounting a Campaign

7 A First Breakthrough 147

8 Setting Up Shop and Strategy 160

Part III Learning Under Fire

9 "The Case That Got Away" 179

10 A "Near Great Leap Forward" 197

11 Coping with a Setback 218

Part IV Moving Forward

12 Getting Back on Track 233

13 Moving Forward on Shifting Political Ground 252

Part V Becoming Judge and Justice

14 An Unexpected Cliff-Hanger 277

15 The 107th Justice 302

16 Mother of the Regiment 327

17 "I Cannot Agree" 349

Part VI Standing Firm

18 Persevering in Hard Times 377

19 Losing Marty and Leading the Minority 405

20 Race Matters 428

21 The Right Thing to Do 450

22 A Hobbled Court 476

23 An Election and a Presidency Like No Other 498

Epilogue: Legacy 529

Afterword 541

Acknowledgments 551

Notes 555

Bibliography 669

Index 705

Editorial Reviews

08/27/2018
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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2018-08-05

The first comprehensive biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. 1933), Supreme Court justice and cultural icon.

Ginsburg grew up in a Jewish community in Brooklyn; early in her career, she repeatedly suffered discrimination both as a woman and as a Jew. Nevertheless, she attended Cornell University and then law school at Harvard and Columbia (after she transferred), joined law school faculties, and was appointed to the federal bench at a time when those achievements were rare for women. Political historian De Hart (co-author: Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation, 1990, etc.) describes in absorbing detail the behind-the-scenes campaign to obtain her appointment to the Supreme Court engineered by her devoted husband, Martin Ginsburg, a renowned tax attorney, gourmet chef, and her biggest cheerleader. Since her arrival in 1993, the court has shifted steadily rightward, leaving her a lionized but increasingly isolated voice of principled dissent. Ginsburg's influence on American law can hardly be exaggerated, particularly in areas regarding minority and women's rights. The author clearly explains how, as an ACLU lawyer, Ginsburg plotted a successful incremental strategy to attack legal discrimination against women, which at the time was pervasive and took remarkably egregious forms. Once Ginsburg reaches the Supreme Court, De Hart excels in explaining the majority opinions, and later the dissents, in which she participated with remarkable clarity, illuminating the issues, the competing positions, and the significance of each in language easily grasped by readers with no legal training (for a nonlawyer, De Hart has a remarkable grasp of court jurisprudence). While the author's primary focus is Ginsburg's professional achievements, she also covers such topics as her battles with cancer, her love of opera, and her unlikely friendship with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia—though, as a notorious workaholic, it often appears she had little noteworthy personal life apart from the law.

A monumental biography of one of the most influential and revered Supreme Court justices of the last century.

Kirkus Reviews

Readable and rewarding. . . . Ginsburg is a true-blue legal icon.”
—NPR

“Engaging and admiring.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“In a revealing new biography, 15 years in the making, Jane Sherron De Hart helps untangle the mystery of the decorous Ginsburg as feminist gladiator.”
—The Atlantic

 “An in-depth biography of the Supreme Court justice who has become a pop-culture icon.”
—USA Today

“De Hart’s thorough biography relates this life story with a nice sense of the sweep of feminist and legal history that is contained within it.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Monumental. . . . The first comprehensive biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. . . . De Hart excels in explaining the majority opinions, and later the dissents, in which she participated with remarkable clarity, illuminating the issues, the competing positions, and the significance of each in language easily grasped by readers with no legal training.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

 “De Hart’s great strength is her ability to explain Ginsburg's cases and the legal strategies she employed. . . . An insightful, fascinating, and admiring biography of one of America’s most extraordinary jurists.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Meticulously researched. . . . Ginsburg’s career is skillfully placed within the context of American social and political history.”
—Library Journal

“Passionate and thorough. . . . A major event in scholarship on American law.”
—Washington Monthly

 “Scholarly, yet accessible. . . . Rewarding and compelling.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Magisterial and timely. . . . Written in clear language and grounded in historical context.”
—The Forward

 “Compelling. . . . De Hart succeeds in showing us that the 107th person to be appointed to the Supreme Court is much more than a pop culture icon.”
—Jewish Journal

“A masterful biography that adds depth and insight to Ginsburg's only-in-America life story.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books

“De Hart displays an impressive grasp of each area of Ginsburg’s legal influence, from women’s rights to voting rights to gay rights to immigrant rights, with a particular focus on striking down laws that discriminated on the basis of gender.”
—Newsweek

“A rigorous, comprehensive, deftly written biography.”
—The National Book Review

 “De Hart dynamically devotes more than 500 pages to the amazing life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. . . . This extensively documented account. . .is also quite engaging and very easy to read.”
—Booklist (starred review)

From the Publisher

09/15/2018
Fifteen years in the making, this meticulously researched, comprehensive volume is the first full biography of Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. 1933). Based on court decisions and interviews with family and friends as well as conversations with Ginsburg herself, De Hart (emerita, history, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; coauthor, Women's America) outlines the forces that shaped the justice's life and jurisprudence. These include the feminist influence of her mother and the impact of her Jewish heritage. Ginsburg's career is skillfully placed within the context of American social and political history from the 1930s to the present. Detailing each step of Ginsburg's career and providing a sophisticated analysis of the justice's thinking on constitutional change, reproductive rights, gender equality, and affirmative action, the author documents the difficulties women have faced in achieving gender equality, the influence of progressive social movements, and the changing dynamics of the Court. With its discussion of both the 2016 presidential race and the accession of Neil Gorsuch to the Court, the book is especially timely. VERDICT For informed readers interested in contemporary American politics as well as women's rights and biographies on influential women. [See Prepub Alert, 4/23/18.]—Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ

Library Journal

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