One might think that the market for treatments of the life and legacy of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be saturated by now. The past three years alone have seen the release of a carefully curated collection of the justice’s writings, “My Own Words,” a surprise hit documentary about her life and career, “RBG,” and a recent feature film, “On the Basis of Sex,” which focuses on the first sex-discrimination case Ginsburg argued in federal court. Now comes “Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life,” by Jane Sherron De Hart, a retired professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This book began as a research project examining Ginsburg’s early career as a women’s-rights litigator at the American Civil Liberties Union, and it expanded into a full-length biography (540 pages of text and 110 pages of footnotes).
Ginsburg spoke at length to the author during the early, limited part of the project, but she curtailed her cooperation later, likely because an authorized biography was (and remains) in the works. Whether because of De Hart’s own initial interest or the benefits of consultation with Ginsburg, the book is strongest when it focuses on Ginsburg’s early life and her work before her appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980. Readers will meet straight-A student and Brooklyn baton-twirler “Kiki” Bader, whose mother Celia died of cancer two days before Kiki’s high-school graduation. They will shake their heads at the notion that Ginsburg, although graduating at the top of her class from Columbia Law School, was offered a clerkship with a federal judge only after her law professor Gerald Gunther offered to substitute another (presumably male) candidate if Ginsburg did not pan out. And they will be touched by Ginsburg’s enduring partnership with her husband, Marty, who, as Ginsburg has said, “believed in me more than I believed in myself.”
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