Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by Irin Carmon

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” she said. But then she added her own words: “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.”

RBG’s main concession to hitting her late seventies was to give up waterskiing.

RBG is determined to stick around and remind her colleagues and the country what she believes is America’s unfinished promise. She likes to quote the opening words of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union.” Beautiful, yes, but as she always points out, “we the people” originally left out a lot of people. “It would not include me,” RBG said, or enslaved people, or Native Americans. Over the course of the centuries, people left out of the Constitution fought to have their humanity recognized by it. RBG sees that struggle as her life’s work.

Celia’s instructions would remain carved in her daughter’s memory. Ruth was to always be a lady. “That meant always conduct yourself civilly, don’t let emotions like anger or envy get in your way,” RBG later explained. “Hold fast to your convictions and your self-respect, be a good teacher, but don’t snap back in anger. Anger, resentment, indulgence in recriminations waste time and sap energy.” Few mothers of that time gave their daughters Celia’s second piece of advice: Always be independent.

“There was a long, cold week at Cornell,” RBG recalled. “So that’s how we started. It occurred to me that Martin D. Ginsburg was ever so much smarter than my boyfriend at Columbia Law School.”

“Sometimes people say unkind or thoughtless things, and when they do, it is best to be a little hard of hearing—to tune out and not snap back in anger or impatience.”

“You felt in class as if all eyes were on you and that if you didn’t perform well, you would be failing not only for yourself, but for all women,”

Some of her classmates worried that going to law school would ruin their chances of marriage, or that their husbands would tire of having wives with plans, but RBG had a husband who bragged that his wife had done better than him. He teased her only about her driving, and even RBG admitted she was a terrible driver.

Still, the kids grew to appreciate what their mother was doing. In her high school yearbook, nearly a decade before RBG was even a judge, Jane listed her ambition “to see her mother appointed to the Supreme Court. If necessary, Jane will appoint her.”

For years, people asked him if it was hard commuting back and forth between New York and Washington. It never occurred to them that a man would leave his job for his wife’s career.

“I was always in awe of her,” says former clerk Kate Andrias, “but there was something disarming about seeing her with a partner who adores her but also treats her like a human being.” Another clerk, Heather Elliott, wrote about one late night, after an event, when RBG was working in chambers while Marty read quietly. “I started to talk to her about the research I had done, and while I was talking, Marty got up and walked toward us. I started freaking out in my mind—‘Is what I am saying that stupid? What is he coming over here for?!’—only to watch him come up to RBG, fix her collar (which had somehow fallen into disarray), and then go back to his book. The comfortable intimacy of that moment was something I will always remember.”

RBG told me, “Marty was always my best friend.”

“My father would certainly not have wanted her to miss the last days on the bench on account of his death,” says Jane. And so she sat there, very still, with a dark ribbon in her hair. As Chief Justice Roberts read a brief tribute to Marty, Scalia wept. Marty was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Not long afterward, the folded American flag from his burial sat on the windowsill of RBG’s chambers.

So what if another justice responded to you, in RBG’s memorable words, with a “spicy dissenting opinion”? The ideals of the court, of fairness and justice, transcend the daily tempers.

When they have children, she sends them “RBG grandclerk” T-shirts with the Supreme Court seal.

“I’ll never forget the end,” says Berman. “Instead of ‘by the power invested in me, by whatever’ she said, ‘by the power vested in me by the United States Constitution.’ My wife always jokes that if we got divorced it would be unconstitutional.”

Ten days into his presidency, Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, with Ledbetter beaming in red behind him. RBG put a framed copy of the law on her wall. Her ideal of a dialogue between the branches of government had been made reality.

When a young RBG suddenly was faced with the prospect of starting law school with a toddler, her father-in-law told her, “If you really want to study the law, you will find a way. You will do it.” RBG says, “I’ve approached everything since then that way. Do I want this or not? And if I do, I’ll do it.”