The Mind of RGB

The cover of The Way Women Are, a book containing "the transformative opinions and dissents" of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sleek, smooth, and inviting. It pictures the judge's favorite white jabot collar woven from tiny white beads set again a black background. That's all we need to recognize who this book will be about.

The book, though, is not about RBG's life, background, secret desires, or even a day in the life. It's about how she thought, as detailed through her decisions and briefs written over the decades she's been a litigator arguing in front of the Supreme Court and as a sitting justice.

The editor, former lawyer Cathy Cambron, has compiled and excerpted what she believes are Justice Ginsburg’s most ground-breaking decisions and dissents in addition to sections from briefs she argued on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

While they cover a variety of subjects as diverse as women's abortion rights and separation of church and state, what they share is a clear-headed, fearless view that the constitution should be applied fairly across the board for Jew, Muslim, female or male. Her writings depict the mind of a judge unafraid to upbraid her brethren's logic and ruffle feathers when an important point needs to be made.

Legal opinions don't make for easy reading. The book is not a synopsis of her greatest hits, but excerpts of actual decisions and briefs which by their very logic-favoring nature do not make for engrossing prose. It's the kind of dense read that pushes law students to develop eight-cup-a-day coffee habits. Yet in spite of the formality—point A leads to point B which leads to point C—each opinion includes a nugget as memorable as any quotable-quote from Shakespeare.

The brief introduction (10 pages of the 284-page book) outlines the trajectory of Ginsberg, nee Joan Ruth Bader, from her birth in Brooklyn in 1933 to her rise through Cornell in the 1950's, to Harvard Law School where she met her husband, to teaching at Columbia law and Rutgers law schools, to volunteering at the ACLU where she co-founded the Women's Rights Project, to her tenure at the U.S. Supreme Court. Hers was not an easy road, confronted with the death of her mom at age sixteen, dealing with her husband's diagnosis of testicular cancer while both were law students, struggling to find a good law job or judicial clerkship upon graduation. According to the book, in 1971, the year she argued her first case in front of the US Supreme Court (Reed v. Reed), only 3% of all attorneys in the country were women.

But information on her stellar rise through the ranks and eventual appointment as the second woman ever on the Supreme Court (after Sandra Day O'Connor) has already been thoroughly explored in books, documentaries, Hollywood movies (On the Basis of Sex [2018]), and through the many interviews she's given. (RBG is not one to shy away from giving her opinion.)

What this book adds, however, is a sampling of her actual words, taken from her decisions, dissents and briefs. It's an up-close view of how her mind works, the acuity of her thinking, the sharpness of her wit, and the ultimate reality that Supreme Court decision-making is a product of nine justices that requires compromise and collegiality.

Because of the book's scope, starting with briefs she wrote fighting for the equal treatment of men and woman in the 1970s through current times with the present Supreme Court make-up, it's often startling and, in my mind, sad to see how her role changed from being that of a leader on issues such as worker's rights, abortion access, equal protection...