Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by Irin Carmon

“I just try to do the good job that I have to the best of my ability, and I really don’t think about whether I’m inspirational. I just do the best I can.” —RBG, 2015

When the jabot with scalloped glass beads glitters flat against the top of RBG’s black robe, it’s bad news for liberals. That’s her dissent collar.

On June 25, 2013, RBG’s mirrored dissent collar glinted blue and yellow in reflected light. By then, in her ninth decade of life and her twentieth year on the court, RBG looked fragile and bowed, dwarfed by the black high-backed chair. But people who had counted her out when she had cancer were wrong, both times. People who thought she couldn’t go on after the death of Marty Ginsburg, her husband of fifty-six years, were wrong too. RBG still showed up to do the work of the court without missing a day. She still pulled all-nighters, leaving her clerks voice mails with instructions at two or three in the morning.

One of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation of the twentieth century had been born of violent images: the faces of murdered civil rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi; Alabama state troopers shattering the skull of young John Lewis on a bridge in Selma.

But for this new challenge to voting rights that came from sixty miles from Selma, Roberts had a more comforting picture to offer the country. High black voter turnout had elected Barack Obama. There were black mayors in Alabama and Mississippi. The protections Congress had reauthorized only a few years earlier were no longer justifiable. Racism was pretty much over now, and everyone could just move on.

This is all according to Justice roberts - is this a joke?

RBG waited quietly for her turn. Announcing a majority opinion in the court chamber is custom, but reading aloud in dissent is rare.

It’s like pulling the fire alarm, a public shaming of the majority that you want the world to hear. Only twenty-four hours earlier, RBG had sounded the alarm by reading two dissents from the bench, one in an affirmative action case and another for two workplace discrimination cases. As she had condemned “the court’s disregard for the realities of the workplace,” Alito, who had written the majority opinion, had rolled his eyes and shook his head. His behavior was unheard of disrespect at the court.

Of course fucking alito

On the morning of the voting rights case, the woman Alito had replaced, RBG’s close friend Sandra Day O’Connor, sat in the section reserved for VIPs. Roberts said his piece, then added, evenly, “Justice Ginsburg has filed a dissenting opinion.”

The noble purpose of the Voting Rights Act, RBG said, was to fight voter suppression that lingered, if more subtly.

The court’s conservative justices were supposed to care about restraint and defer to Congress, but they had wildly overstepped.

“Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA,” RBG had written in her opinion. Killing the Voting Rights Act because it had worked too well, she had added, was like “throwing away your umb...

At stake, RBG told the courtroom, was “what was once the subject of a dream, the equal citizenship stature of all in our polity, a voice to every voter in our democracy undiluted by race.” It was an obvious reference to Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, but the ...

Forty years earlier, RBG had stood before a different set of justices and forced them to see that women were people too in the eyes of the Constitution. That women, along with men, deserved equal citizenship stature, to stand with all the rights and responsibilities that being a citizen meant. As part of a movement inspired by King’s, RBG had gone from having doors slammed in her face to winning five out of six of the women’s rights cases she argued before the Supreme Court. No one—not the firms and judges that had refused to hire a young mother, not the bosses who had forced her out of a job for getting pregnant or paid her less for being a woman—had ever expected her to be sitting up there at the court.

RBG often repeated her mother’s advice that getting angry was a waste of your own time. Even more often, she shared her mother-in-law’s counsel for marriage: that sometimes it helped to be a little deaf. Those words had served her in the bad old days of blatant sexism, through the conservative backlash of the eighties, and on a court of people essentially stuck together for life. But lately, RBG was tired of pretending not to hear. Roberts had arrived with promises of compromise, but a few short years and a handful of 5–4 decisions were swiftly threatening the progress for which she had fought so hard.

RBG quoted Martin Luther King directly: “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.”

Not exactly poetry. But pure RBG. On or off the bench, she has always been steadfast, and when the work is justice, she has every intention to see it to the end. RBG has always been about doing the work. People wondered where the quiet and seemingly meek RBG had gone, where this firebrand had come from. But the truth is, that woman had always been there.

YOU CAN’T SPELL TRUTH WI...

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, twenty-six-year-old law student Hallie Jay Pope started drawing. Her comic showed RBG patiently explaining to her colleagues what had gone wrong in each case that week. “RBG” finally loses it with “Roberts’s” glib exclamation in Shelby, “LOL racism is fixed!” Pope made an “I Heart RBG” shirt and donated the proceeds to a voting rights organization.

No other justice, however scrutinized or respected, has so captured the public’s imagination. The public image of RBG in her over thirty years as a judge was as a restrained moderate. The people closest to RBG find her entrance to the zeitgeist hilarious, if perplexing. “It’s hard for me to think of someone less likely to care about being a cult figure,” says David Schizer, a former RBG clerk and now a friend.

The adoring portrayal of an older woman like RBG as both fierce and knowing, points out the feminist author Rebecca Traister, is “a crucial expansion of the American imagination with regard to powerful women.” For

too long, Traister says, older women have been reduced in our cultural consciousness to “nanas, bubbes” or “ballbusters, nutcrackers, and bitches.” RBG’s old friend Gloria Steinem, who marvels at seeing the justice’s image all over campuses, is happy to see RBG belie Steinem’s ow...

Historically, one way women have lost power is by being nudged out the door to make room for someone else. Not long before pop culture discovered RBG, liberal law professors and commentators began telling her the best thing she could do for what she cared about was to quit, so that President Barack Obama could appoint a successor.

They would NEVER tell a man that!!

When Justice John Paul Stevens retired in 2010, RBG became the most senior of the court’s liberals, a leadership role she has embraced.

RBG stays because she loves her work, but also, it seems, because she thinks the court is headed in an alarming direction. After years of toil, often in the shadows, she is poised to explain to the country just what is going wrong.

“She’s not just deliberative as a matter of principle but as a matter of temperament,” her friend the critic Leon Wieseltier has said. “A conversation with her is a special pleasure because there are no words that are not preceded by thoughts.” She is wholly committed, above all, to the work of the court.

Kathleen Peratis, who succeeded RBG as director of the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, said years ago, “Ruth is almost pure work. The anecdote that describes her best is that there are no anecdotes.” (The second part is not strictly true.) She has survived tragedies and calamities. People have found her somber, but it is sometimes because her humor is so deadpan dry that it escapes many. She can be exacting, but rewards with loyalty and generosity. She had a passionate love affair with her husband that lasted almost sixty years.

RBG is a woman who, to use another phrase that mattered a lot to her...

Wulf, a man of the 1960s, shrugged. “I’ll say this, she is by no means a bomb thrower,” he insisted. “But,” said Peratis, “the things she achieved were bombshells.”

Put another way, RBG was already a radical just by being herself—a woman who beat the odds to make her mark.

The world as it was had no room for her. That injustice left her no choice bu...

And yet as this book’s closer look at her life and work shows, RBG is about more than simply breaking glass ceilings to join a man’s world. As the cofounder of the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, and often called the Thurgood Marshall of the women’s rights movement, RBG devised careful, incremental plans for revolutionary goals. She imagined a world where men transformed themselves alongside women and where sexual and reproductive freedom was grounded in women’s equality, and then she worked to make it real. Many of her ideals, from the liberation of men to the valuing of caregivers, remain unrealized. RBG’s longtime friend Cynthia Fuchs Epstein says, “I think had she not had this persona as this very soft-spoken, neat, and tidy person, with a conventional life, she would have been considered a flaming radical.”

But the arrival of two Bush appointees to the court gave a narrow majority to a conservative agenda of undermining remedies for racial justice, reproductive rights, access to health care, and protections for workers, while giving corporations ever more rights and political influence. Even the current balance, tipped rightward with a chance of wobble, is precarious. The next president may appoint as many as three justices.

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.

December 1853 “Was invited to sit in the Chief Justice’s seat. As I took the place, I involuntarily exclaimed: ‘Who knows, but this chair may one day be occupied by a woman.’ The brethren laughed heartily.” —abolitionist feminist Sarah Grimké

January 4, 1897: A woman abducted from her home at gunpoint wasn’t raped, the Supreme Court says in Mills v. United States, because for an act to be rape, “more force is necessary.”

August 18, 1920: The Nineteenth Amendment recognizes women’s right to vote, though violent barriers remain for women of color.

March 15, 1933: Joan Ruth Bader, nicknamed Kiki, is born in Brooklyn.

Start here with quotes - quotes I want to record on Bookly will be in orange

1944: Lucille Lomen becomes the first female clerk at the Supreme Court.

June 7, 1965: The Supreme Court finds that Connecticut’s birth control ban violates a “right to marital privacy.”

June 13, 1967: President Johnson nominates famed civil rights litigator Thurgood Marshall (and RBG inspiration) to be the first black justice of the Supreme Court.

Spring 1970: RBG teaches her first class on women and the law.

Spring 1972: RBG cofounds the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

January 22, 1973: In Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the Supreme Court makes abortion legal throughout the United States. RBG is uneasy about how the court got there, and how fast.

“This right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” —Justice Harry Blackmun, Roe v. Wade

August 19, 1981: President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court. Male justices who had made noises over the years about resigning if a woman ever joined their ranks stay put.

June 14, 1993: President Bill Clinton nominates RBG to be an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.

“To my sorrow, I am now what [O’Connor] was her first twelve years on the court—the lone woman.” —RBG

April 18, 2007: RBG launches her era of furious dissent with the abortion case Gonzales v. Carhart. “The Court . . . pretends that its decision protects women.” —RBG, summarizing her dissent from the bench

“I like the idea that we’re all over the bench. It says women are here to stay.” —RBG