Notorious RBG: The Life & Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik ****

Notorious RBG: The Life & Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon & Shana Knizhnik

Notorious RBG was published in 2015, so it ends with an optimistic view of RBG holding on to her position on the Supreme Court to the very end. “A Hillary Clinton presidency might be the perfect moment for RBG to step down.”

Notorious RBG is a bitter-sweet biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She thought strategically. Under her leadership, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project systematically took cases to the Supreme Court to advance women’s rights one step at a time. She faulted Roe v. Wade because it moved too fast, legalizing abortion throughout the country before society was ready for that move. She would have preferred progress that went state by state.

While she was on the court majority, she espoused compromise and collegiality, but when the court shifted, she let those ideals slide and wrote many dissents. “RBG NEVER ESPECIALLY WANTED to be a great dissenter. She prefers not to lose, which is what, by definition, has happened to judges who write to dispute the court’s majority opinion.”

For all her strategic thought, in the end, Trump was the one who replaced her.

“RBG declared that Roe itself was the problem. If only the court had acted more slowly, RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” RBG was always confident in her decisions, though not always correct. RBG was pushing sixty, and she had never been a large woman. “I told Ruth she should sit in the back of the boat, because she was so light that if they hit a rock, she would go flying over,” Neuborne says. “Her response: ‘I don’t sit in the back.’”

Sexism: When I asked her if she still experiences sexism, RBG replied readily. “Yes. Less than I once did. Once it happened all the time that I would say something and there was no response. And then a man would say the same thing and people would say, ‘Good idea.’” She laughed. “That happens much less today.”

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