The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. By Scott Dodson, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 314 pp. $29.99 cloth.

Abstract

The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. By Scott Dodson, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 314 pp. $29.99 cloth.Associate Justice on U.S. Supreme Court. Law professor. General Counsel for ACLU's Women's Project. Pop culture icon. As Scott Dodson puts it, Ruth Bader Ginsburg's impact on law over last half-century cannot be overstated (p. ix). While her successful challenges gender norms and her fiery dissents on behalf of voting rights and equal pay are source of much of her popular acclaim, this fine collection of essays also explores her contributions fields of federal procedure, jurisdiction, federalism, international law, criminal procedure, and tax law. The collection is divided into four parts: Shaping a Legacy, and Remedies, Structuralism, and The Jurist. As is perhaps befitting a collection devoted detailing her wide-ranging legacy, contributors include law professors, media stars, a practitioner, a historian, a sitting judge and even a short previously published piece penned Ginsburg herself.As contributor and Legal Affairs Correspondent for National Public Radio Nina Totenberg succinctly suggests Ginsburg way world is for American (p. 4). Slate Magazine Senior Editor Dahlia Lithwick notes that it has become somewhat cliche refer Ginsburg as the Thurgood Marshall of Women's Rights (p. 222). Many of essays in this collection detail exactly how this shift took place, emphasizing careful legal, professional, and personal strategies that Ginsburg employed, slowly but surely upending gender norms that had oppressed women for years. The collection includes several essays that show just how pervasive those sexist norms were in both private and public life, and how they were addressed Ginsburg as a law professor, attorney, judge and justice. Ginsburg herself was passed over for clerkships and otherwise professionally demeaned due her gender despite having attended elite schools. Even after obtaining a position as a law professor Ginsburg felt compelled conceal a pregnancy for fear of being denied tenure. An essay on pregnancy discrimination as sex discrimination Neil S. Siegel and Reva B. Siegel suggests connection between this experience and Ginsburg's advocacy in this area. As historian Linda Kerber's contribution shows, Ginsburg's literally changed rules about gender, using law question long-standing assumptions that men are preferable women, before which, as Ginsburg herself has said, the Supreme Court never saw a sex classification it didn't like (p. 38).Many of essays in this collection explore strategies and arguments that Ginsburg has used affect these changes. As Dahlia Lithwick's essay notes, Ginsburg was not a product of women's liberation movement. Rather her calling law was a response injustices that resulted from McCarthyism. Although her professional disposition is that of a careful jurist Lithwick argues that she is indeed a feminist if one that is by choice and necessity, a firebrand made of ice (p. 222). Calling Ginsburg's approach gender reconstructive feminism, Joan C. Williams distinguishes it from Catherine MacKinnon's more radical feminism unmodified. While Ginsburg's approach has been dismissed some as merely reformist, Williams argues that Ginsburg's goal has been no less than to reconstruct breadwinner and caregiver roles and, more generally, relationship of market and family work (p. 59). As such, Ginsburg's approach has challenged givenness of male masculinity, very core of patriarchal power.Cary Franklin's essay on VMI case suggests that Ginsburg's rejection of gender neutrality and attention specific contexts in which gender discrimination plays out could serve as a model for equal protection more generally in affirmative action, voting rights, and school desegregation cases where race neutral analyses have prevailed in recent years. …