Long before she became “Notorious,” Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an attorney arguing gender equality cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. The cases she won in the 1970s changed the meaning of the Constitution, adding legal equality for women to it. That is the reason RBG became the first Jewish American and the first woman to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol.
Most Americans have a mental picture of RBG as an elderly woman with oversized glasses and a judicial collar. In fact, she was a stunning, and stunningly brilliant, young lawyer who drew upon her Jewish heritage to insist that confining women – and men – to stereotypical roles violated their rights as human beings. She took as her mission what she described as giving the all-male Supreme Court the equivalent of a grade-school education in the ways both women and men were hurt by a reliance on outmoded notions about proper gender roles. The book, written in language accessible to the general public, details the human stories behind the cases.