Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World, is a biographical account of two leading figures in the US political and legal division, Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Both were the first and second, respectively, women on the Supreme Court and were integral to the advancement of women’s rights.
The book serves to comment and compare on the women’s careers as well as their impact on women’s rights. Whilst O’Connor was brought up in the wealthy neighborhood of Phoenix and similarly, Ginsburg in the New York’s Upper East Side, both broke convention and went against the grain of society at the time by pursuing legal careers.
Ginsburg is compared to notable figures like Mozart and jane Austen, by Hirshman, who states “Mozart had, by many accounts, five operatic masterpieces. Jane Austen’s reputation rests on five novels. . . . In five landmark cases over less than a decade, [Ginsburg] largely transformed the constitutional status of women in America.” In contrast, Hirshman is more critical of O’Connor, and suggests that her ambition to help women’s rights was halted by “her ambitions in a conservative Republican Party.”
