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Title details for Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Jane Sherron de Hart - Available

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

A Life

by Jane Sherron de Hart
Suzanne Toren
Audiobook
3 of 4 copies available
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3 of 4 copies available
The first full life—private, public, legal, philosophical—of the 107th Supreme Court Justice, one of the most profound and profoundly transformative legal minds of our time; a book fifteen years in work, written with the cooperation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself and based on many interviews with the justice, her husband, her children, her friends, and her associates.
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 seventeen, 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 Schools (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 U.S. 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 16, 2018

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780525643371
      • File size: 693000 KB
      • Duration: 24:03:44

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Justice Ginsburg, the subject of this audiobook, is restrained and self-contained, and so, appropriately, is narrator Suzanne Toren. It's an excellent performance, steady and professional, dramatic enough to keep the listener engaged but not garish or melodramatic. The audiobook is definitely Ginsburg-friendly. Listeners hoping for a more critical assessment of the justice's life and work will have to wait for some other author to tackle that chore. This audiobook's value lies in its recounting of the particular time in history when Ginsburg came of age and how she, with others, has contributed so greatly to jurisprudence benefiting both men and women. Toren handles her long performance with aplomb while remaining true to the author's tone and perspective. Listeners are well served. G.S. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 27, 2018
      De Hart, a professor emerita of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, offers a laudatory biography of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. De Hart, who had Ginsburg’s cooperation, pays appropriate attention both to the experiences that informed Ginsburg’s passion for justice and to her personal life, highlighting her lifelong love affair with her husband and her friendships with professional colleagues, including her ideological opposite Antonin Scalia. De Hart’s great strength is her ability to explain Ginsburg’s cases and the legal strategies she employed, for example, to convince the Supreme Court to apply the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution to strike down laws that discriminate on the basis of gender. De Hart clearly and accessibly lays out background information, the various legal theories employed, and the judges’ holdings. She also demonstrates Ginsburg’s far-reaching influence as the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court, in 1993, taking readers into the inner workings of the court as Ginsburg and other justices war over the defining legal and cultural issues of the era—abortion rights, marriage equality, race, and religion. Readers will find this an insightful, fascinating, and admiring biography of one of America’s most extraordinary jurists.

    • BookPage
      The 107th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court has become an unlikely icon, a tiny-but-titanic 85-year-old whom popular culture has dubbed the “Notorious RBG.” She is showcased on everything from T-shirts to comedy sketches on “Saturday Night Live.” Lest this giant of jurisprudence lose her gravitas amid such fame, Jane Sherron De Hart does a daunting job of restoring Ginsburg’s impressive roots in Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life. Hart’s biography is a studious walk through Ginsburg’s own keen recollections, arm and arm with explorations of many landmark cases, as well as their historical, social and political landscapes. Ginsburg’s colleagues on the Supreme Court, including the first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, and her fellow opera lover, the mercurial Antonin Scalia, are here as well, coloring the historical record and shedding up-close-and-personal light on the daily work of the court. During her first year at Harvard Law School in 1956, Ginsburg was one of nine females in a class of 552, and the dean routinely asked her, “Why are you . . . taking a place that could have gone to a man?” Later, despite a stellar academic record, she had trouble landing a job. As she noted, “To be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot” was “a bit too much” in 1959. By the time Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Carter in 1980, her record of advocating for equal rights for women and men had made her a hero among feminists. Nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton, she has served since as a strident voice on both liberal and conservative courts. She is known for distilling legalese into language the press and public can understand, and her opinions and dissents have buttressed groundbreaking cases that involve such issues as abortion, immigration and gender equality. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” De Hart leaves no doubt that, in Justice Ginsburg’s hands, that arc will undoubtedly continue to bend.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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