Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In this large comprehensive revelatory biography Jane De Hart explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg's passion for justice her advocacy for gender equality her meticulous jurisprudence: her desire to make We the People more united and our union more perfect. At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs--her Jewish background. Tikkun Olam the Hebrew injunction to "repair the world " with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II. We see the influence of her mother Celia Amster Bader whose intellect inspired her daughter's feminism insisting that Ruth become independent as she witnessed her mother coping with terminal cervical cancer (Celia died the day before Ruth at 17 graduated from high school). From Ruth's days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn's James Madison High School to Cornell University Harvard and Columbia Law School (first in her class) to being a law professor at Rutgers University (one of the few women in the field and fighting pay discrimination) hiding her second pregnancy so as not to risk losing her job; founding the Women's Rights Law Reporter writing the brief for the first case that persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down a sex-discriminatory state law then at Columbia (the law school's first tenured female professor); becoming the director of the women's rights project of the ACLU persuading the Supreme Court in a series of decisions to ban laws that denied women full citizenship status with men. Her years on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit deciding cases the way she played golf as she left-handed played with right-handed clubs--aiming left swinging right hitting down the middle. Her years on the Supreme Court. A pioneering life and legal career whose profound mark on American jurisprudence on American society on our American character and spirit will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and beyond.