Now in her eighties, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has spent more than twenty years as an associate justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, thirteen years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and seventeen years as law professor. During her teaching years, she was also general counsel for the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, which she co-founded. Her impact on the law over the last half-century cannot be overstated. Yet no book on Ginsburg’s legacy exists. This book will be the first to fill that gaping void.

As the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court, Justice Ginsburg’s jurisprudence is perhaps best known for influencing the law on women’s rights. In particular, her landmark opinion for the Court in United States v. Virginia established heightened scrutiny for gender segregation in state schools, and her dissenting opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. helped motivate Congress to pass the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which abrogated the Court’s cramped interpretation of federal gender-discrimination laws. In 1937, a Gallup poll asked, “Would you vote for a woman presidential candidate?” and received only 33 percent of answers in the affirmative. In 2012, the percentage had risen to 95 percent. We’ve come a long way, baby, and Ginsburg’s monumental efforts as a justice have contributed to those social changes.