Ruth Bader Ginsburg : a life

Summary: In this comprehensive, revelatory biography--fifteen years of interviews and research in the making--historian Jane Sherron De Hart explores the experiences that shaped Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, and her meticulous jurisprudence. At the heart of her story is her Jewish background and the concept of tikkun olam, the Hebrew injunction to "repair the world," with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. Ginsburg's journey begins with her mother, who died tragically young but whose intellect inspired her daughter's feminism. It stretches from Ginsburg's days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn's James Madison High School to Cornell University to Harvard and Columbia law schools; to becoming one of the first female law professors in the country, fighting for equal pay and hiding her second pregnancy to avoid losing her job; to becoming the director of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project and arguing momentous anti-sex discrimination cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. All this, even before being nominated in 1993 to become the second woman on the Court, where her crucial decisions and dissents are still making history. Intimately and personably told, this biography offers unprecedented insight into a pioneering life and legal career whose profound mark on American jurisprudence, American society, and our American character will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and beyond. -- Publisher's description.