The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. By Scott Dodson, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 314 pp. $29.99 cloth.

The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. By Scott Dodson, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 314 pp. $29.99 cloth.Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Law professor. General Counsel for the ACLU's Women's Rights Project. Pop culture icon. As Scott Dodson puts it, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's "impact on the law over the last half-century cannot be overstated" (p. ix). While her successful challenges to gender norms and her fiery dissents on behalf of voting rights and equal pay are the source of much of her popular acclaim, this fine collection of essays also explores her contributions to the fields of federal procedure, jurisdiction, federalism, international law, criminal procedure, and tax law. The collection is divided into four parts: Shaping a Legacy, Rights and Remedies, Structuralism, and The Jurist. As is perhaps befitting a collection devoted to detailing her wide-ranging legacy, contributors include law professors, media stars, a practitioner, a historian, a sitting judge and even a short previously published piece penned by Ginsburg herself.As contributor and Legal Affairs Correspondent for National Public Radio Nina Totenberg succinctly suggests Ginsburg "changed the way the world is for American women" (p. 4). Slate Magazine Senior Editor Dahlia Lithwick notes that it has become somewhat cliche to refer to Ginsburg as "the Thurgood Marshall of Women's Rights" (p. 222). Many of the essays in this collection detail exactly how this shift took place, emphasizing the careful legal, professional, and personal strategies that Ginsburg employed, slowly but surely upending gender norms that had oppressed women for years. The collection includes several essays that show just how pervasive those sexist norms were in both private and public life, and how they were addressed by Ginsburg as a law professor, attorney, judge and justice. Ginsburg herself was passed over for clerkships and otherwise professionally demeaned due to her gender despite having attended elite schools. Even after obtaining a position as a law professor Ginsburg felt compelled to conceal a pregnancy for fear of being denied tenure. An essay on pregnancy discrimination as sex discrimination by Neil S. Siegel and Reva B. Siegel suggests the connection between this experience and Ginsburg's advocacy in this area. As historian Linda Kerber's contribution shows, Ginsburg's work literally changed the rules about gender, using the law to question long-standing assumptions that men are preferable to women, before which, as Ginsburg herself has said, "the Supreme Court never saw a sex classification it didn't like" (p. 38).Many of the essays in this collection explore the strategies and arguments that Ginsburg has used to affect these changes. As Dahlia Lithwick's essay notes, Ginsburg was not a product of the women's liberation movement. Rather her calling to law was a response to the injustices that resulted from McCarthyism. Although her professional disposition is that of a careful jurist Lithwick argues that she is "indeed a feminist firebrand" if one that is "by choice and necessity, a firebrand made of ice" (p. 222). Calling Ginsburg's approach to gender "reconstructive feminism," Joan C. Williams distinguishes it from Catherine MacKinnon's more radical "feminism unmodified." While Ginsburg's approach has been dismissed by some as merely reformist, Williams argues that Ginsburg's goal has been no less than "to reconstruct breadwinner and caregiver roles and, more generally, the relationship of market work and family work" (p. 59). As such, Ginsburg's approach has challenged the givenness of male masculinity, the very core of patriarchal power.Cary Franklin's essay on the VMI case suggests that Ginsburg's rejection of gender neutrality and attention to the specific contexts in which gender discrimination plays out could serve as a model for equal protection more generally in affirmative action, voting rights, and school desegregation cases where race neutral analyses have prevailed in recent years. …