Notorious RBG

Irin Carmon, Shana Knizhnik

• Publisher: Dey Street Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780062415820
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito giuridico

New York Times Bestseller

Featured in the critically acclaimed documentary RBG

"It was beyond my wildest imagination that I would one day become the 'Notorious RBG." — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 2019

She was a fierce dissenter with a serious collar game. A legendary, self-described "flaming feminist litigator" who made the world more equal. And an intergenerational icon affectionately known as the Notorious RBG. As the nation mourns the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, discover the story of a remarkable woman and learn how to carry on her legacy.

This runaway bestseller, brought to you by the attorney founder of the Notorious RBG Tumblr and an award-winning feminist journalist, is more than just a love letter. It draws on intimate access to Ginsburg's family members, close friends, colleagues, and clerks, as well as an interview with the Justice herself. An original hybrid of reported narrative, annotated dissents, rare archival photos and documents, and illustrations, the book tells a never-before-told story of an unusual and transformative woman who transcended divides and changed the world forever.

“I just try to do the good job that I have to the best of my ability, and I really don’t think about whether I’m inspirational. I just do the best I can.”

—RBG, 2015

THIS IS WHAT you should look for on this 90-degree June morning: The broadcast news interns pairing running shoes with their summer business casual, hovering by the Supreme Court’s public information office. They’re waiting to clamber down the marble steps of the court to hand off the opinions to an on-air correspondent. You should count the number of boxes the court officers lay out, because each box holds one or two printed opinions. Big opinions get their own box. This contorted ritual exists because no cameras are allowed inside the court. It jealously guards its traditions and fears grandstanding.

What happens inside the hushed chamber is pure theater. Below the friezes of Moses and Hammurabi, the buzz-cut U.S. marshals scowl the visitors into silence. The justices still have ceramic spittoons at their feet. At 10 A.M. sharp, wait for the buzzer and watch everyone snap to their feet. As a marshal cries “Oyez, oyez, oyez!” watch Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, known around the court as RBG, as she takes her seat at the winged mahogany bench. Look around her neck. When the jabot with scalloped glass beads glitters flat against the top of RBG’s black robe, it’s bad news for liberals. That’s her dissent collar.

On June 25, 2013, RBG’s mirrored dissent collar glinted blue and yellow in reflected light. By then, in her ninth decade of life and her twentieth year on the court, RBG looked fragile and bowed, dwarfed by the black high-backed chair. But people who had counted her out when she had cancer were wrong, both times. People who thought she couldn’t go on after the death of Marty Ginsburg, her husband of fifty-six years, were wrong too. RBG still showed up to do the work of the court without missing a day. She still pulled all-nighters, leaving her clerks voice mails with instructions at two or three in the morning.

The night before had been a long one. From RBG’s perch, third from the right in order of seniority, she sometimes gazed up at the marble columns and wondered to herself if she was really there or if it were all a dream. But that Tuesday morning, her eyes were on her notes. The opinion was long finished, but she had something else to say, and she wanted to get it right. She scribbled intently as Justice Samuel Alito, seated to her left, read two opinions, about land and a bitter custody case involving Indian law. Those were not the cases the cameras were waiting for. It was a two-box day. There was one more left.

Court artist sketch of Shelby County dissent from the bench, June 25, 2013 Art Lien

It was Chief Justice John Roberts’s turn to announce an opinion he had assigned himself. The case was Shelby County v. Holder, a challenge to the constitutionality of a major portion of the Voting Rights Act.

Roberts has an amiable Midwestern affect and a knack for simple but elegant phrases that had served him well when he was a lawyer arguing before the justices. “Any racial discrimination in voting is too much,” Roberts declared that morning. “But our country has changed in the last fifty years.”

One of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation of the twentieth century had been born of violent images: the faces of murdered civil rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi; Alabama state troopers shattering the skull of young John Lewis on a bridge in Selma. But for this new challenge to voting rights that came from sixty miles from Selma, Roberts had a more comforting picture to offer the country. High black voter turnout had elected Barack Obama. There were black mayors in Alabama and Mississippi. The protections Congress had reauthorized only a few years earlier were no longer justifiable. Racism was pretty much over now, and everyone could just move on.

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. As she had condemned “the court’s disregard for the realities of the workplace,” Alito, who had written the majority opinion, had rolled his eyes and shook his head. His behavior was unheard of disrespect at the court.

On the morning of the voting rights case, the woman Alito had replaced, RBG’s close friend Sandra Day O’Connor, sat in the section reserved for VIPs. Roberts said his piece, then added, evenly, “Justice Ginsburg has filed a dissenting opinion.”

RBG’s voice had grown both raspier and fainter, but that morning there was no missing her passion. Alito sat frozen, holding his fist to his cheek. The noble purpose of the Voting Rights Act, RBG said, was to fight voter suppression that lingered, if more subtly. The court’s conservative justices were supposed to care about restraint and defer to Congress, but they had wildly overstepped. “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA,” RBG had written in her opinion. Killing the Voting Rights Act because it had worked too well, she had added, was like “throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

At stake, RBG told the courtroom, was “what was once the subject of a dream, the equal citizenship stature of all in our polity, a voice to every voter in our democracy undiluted by race.” It was an obvious reference to Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, but the phrase equal citizenship stature has special meaning to RBG in particular.

Sofia Sanchez and Mauro Mongiello/Trunk Archive

Forty years earlier, RBG had stood before a different set of justices and forced them to see that women were people too in the eyes of the Constitution. That women, along with men, deserved equal citizenship stature, to stand with all the rights and responsibilities that being a citizen meant. As part of a movement inspired by King’s, RBG had gone from having doors slammed in her face to winning five out of six of the women’s rights cases she argued before the Supreme Court. No one—not the firms and judges that had refused to hire a young mother, not the bosses who had forced her out of a job for getting pregnant or paid her less for being a woman—had ever expected her to be sitting up there at the court.

RBG often repeated her mother’s advice that getting angry was a waste of your own time. Even more often, she shared her mother-in-law’s counsel for marriage: that sometimes it helped to be a little deaf. Those words had served her in the bad old days of blatant sexism, through the conservative backlash of the eighties, and on a court of people essentially stuck together for life. But lately, RBG was tired of pretending not to hear. Roberts had arrived with promises of compromise, but a few short years and a handful of 5–4 decisions were swiftly threatening the progress for which she had fought so hard.

That 2012–2013 term, reading dissents from the bench in five cases, RBG broke a half-century-long record among all justices. Her dissent in the voting rights case was the last and the most furious. At nearly 10:30 A.M., RBG quoted Martin Luther King directly: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” she said. But then she added her own words: “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion.”

Not exactly poetry. But pure RBG. On or off the bench, she has always been steadfast, and when the work is justice, she has every intention to see it to the end. RBG has always been about doing the work.

People wondered where the quiet and seemingly meek RBG had gone, where this firebrand had come from. But the truth is, that woman had always been there.

YOU CAN’T SPELL TRUTH WITHOUT RUTH

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RBG had launched her protest from the bench on the morning of June 25 hoping people outside the court would listen. They did. As it sunk in that the court had, in the words of civil rights hero and Congressman John Lewis, put “a dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act,” progressives felt a mix of despair and fury, but also admiration for how RBG had spoken up. “Everyone was angry on the Internet at the same time,” remembers Aminatou Sow. Sow and her friend Frank Chi were both young, D.C. based digital strategists, used to channeling their frustrations into shareable objects. They wanted to do something. Chi spontaneously took a Simmie Knox painting of RBG, with its cool, watchful eyes and taut mouth, and gave it a red background and a crown inspired by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Sow gave it words: “Can’t spell truth without Ruth.” They put it on Instagram, then plastered Washington with stickers.

Frank Chi and Aminatou Sow

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