num_pages: 752
description: The first full lifeprivate public legal philosophicalof 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 Ginsburgs passion for justice her advocacy for gender equality her meticulous her desire to make We the People more united and our union more perfect. At the heart of her story and abiding beliefsher 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 daughters 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 Ruths days as a baton twirler at Brooklyns 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 schools first tenured female professor); becoming the director of the womens 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 clubsaiming 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.
language: English
title: Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life
publisher: Knopf