Girly Law
Because she was a female volunteer, the progressive-minded folks in charge at the ACLU of New Jersey decided Ginsburg would be the ideal person to begin handling a sudden influx of letters from women describing legal problems related to being…women. See how that fits? The womanly concerns of women becomes imagery that paints a portrait of how systemic discrimination becomes a system:
“A woman who worked at Lipton Tea was barred from adding her family to her health insurance plan because the company assumed only married men had dependents. Girls weren’t welcome in Princeton’s summer engineering program. The best tennis player in Teaneck, New Jersey, wasn’t allowed on the varsity team because she was a girl.”
The Notorious Dissenter
Ginsburg rewrote the unwritten rules of conventional behavior on the highest bench in the land when she arrived to take her seat on the Supreme Court. What had been custom and tradition before she arrived was tossed through the window like a freshly lit Molotov cocktail as the idea of routinely voicing dissent was introduced to the Court. Some lesser minds were not prepared for this leap over two centuries of stagnation:
“RBG waited quietly for her turn. Announcing a majority opinion in the court chamber is custom, but reading aloud in dissent is rare. It’s like pulling the fire alarm, a public shaming of the majority that you want the world to hear. Only twenty-four hours earlier, RBG had sounded the alarm by reading two dissents from the bench, one in an affirmative action case and another for two workplace discrimination cases…[Justice] Alito, who had written the majority opinion, had rolled his eyes and shook his head. His behavior was unheard of disrespect at the court.”
“R.B. Juicy”
An appendix to the book contains a wealth of unusual additions not usually found in biographies of Supreme Court justices. To say the least: a recipe for Marty Ginsburg’s pork loin, excerpts from the opera about the friendship between Ginsburg and Scalia, and even the lyrics to a rap song praising her with a new nickname: R.B. Juicy. The imagery is historical fact with a twist:
“Remember Frankfurter, duh-ha, duh-ha
He never thought a woman could go this far Now I’m in the limelight cause I decide right Court has moved right, but my dissents get cites Born sinner, but
definitely a winner
Defending women’s rights cause unlike them, I’d been `her’
Peace to Willie, Jimmy C, and guess who?
Erwin Griswold, the ACLU”
Fashion
One doesn’t normally think of fashion when it comes to Supreme Court justices in general, much less Ginsburg, but a fair amount of space is handed over during one section of the book to describing her various vagaries of style consciousness. Some of this imagery might well be surprising—even shocking—to even her most ardent admirers:
"When she turned up at the Senate last summer in a swingy pleated skirt and striped tunic-length top with a string of beads, she looked more pulled together than any woman in the Washington eye since Jackie Kennedy Onassis.”
“It was hard not to be struck by her improbable glamour. Scarcely more than five feet tall, in a turquoise Chinese-silk jacket with matching wide-legged pants, her black hair pulled tightly back in a ponytail, she looked like an exquisite figurine.’”
