Ruth Bader Ginsburg: a life

In this bestselling comprehensive, revelatory biography - fifteen years of interviews and research in the making - historian Jane Sherron De Hart explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg’s passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, and her meticulous jurisprudence.   

At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs was her Jewish background, specifically the concept of 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.   

Ruth’s journey begins with her mother, who died tragically young but whose intellect inspired her daughter’s feminism. It stretches from Ruth’s days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School to Cornell University, and to Harvard and Columbia Law Schools; to becoming one of the first female law professors in the US and having to fight for equal pay and hide her second pregnancy to avoid losing her job; and to arguing momentous anti-sex discrimination cases before the US Supreme Court.   

All this, even before being nominated in 1993 to become the second woman on the court, where her crucial decisions and dissents are still making history. Intimately, personably told, this biography offers unprecedented insight into a pioneering life and legal career whose profound mark on American jurisprudence, American society, and American character and spirit will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and beyond.