My Own Words

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2016

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Background

Authorial Context: Ginsburg’s Background and Education

In their description of Ginsburg’s childhood, secondary education, college, and legal training, the biographers discuss several elements of Ginsburg’s life that played pivotal roles in shaping her as a person and in focusing her on significant causes. The premature deaths of family members—her sister when Ginsburg was one, her mother when she was 17, and her father when she was 35—left her as the only surviving member of her family of origin at an early age. The biographers describe Ginsburg’s awareness of perceived injustices: Unlike the young men in her synagogue, she could not participate in the Jewish ritual of adulthood, the bar mitzvah; her great uncle demolished the treasured bicycle of her uncle when he caught Celia’s brother riding it on the Sabbath. These injustices were not confined to her personal world. As her early essays reveal, she was well-aware of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe. Given that her father was a first-generation immigrant from Ukraine, where the Nazis ultimately killed 1.6 million Jews, and her mother’s parents immigrated from Poland, where the Nazis killed 3 million Jews, Ginsburg had a strong connection to the suffering and injustice experienced by Holocaust victims, a reality she wrote about while in her early teens.

Those who educated Ginsburg responded to her precocious intellect. In the eighth grade, she graduated at the top of her class, having served as the editor of her public-school newspaper. An honor student in high school, Ginsburg missed the chance to speak at her graduation ceremony, which took place two days after her mother’s death. Not yet 18, Ginsburg began attending Cornell University that fall. There, her writing was profoundly influenced by author Vladimir Nabokov and her social conscious informed by constitutional scholar Robert Cushman, who challenged her to attend law school. Two years after her graduation from Cornell—married and a mother—Ginsburg accepted the challenge, attending Harvard Law School and then Columbia. That no New York firm offered to hire a woman, even though she graduated tied for first in her class, hearkened back to the injustice and inequity she recognized as a child.

Authorial Context: Ginsburg’s History of Authorship and Litigation

When Ginsburg appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to begin her examination after her nomination to become a US Supreme Court justice, she talked about the various writings that she presented to the senators for their perusal:

You have been supplied, in the five weeks since the president announced my nomination […] with thousands of pages I have penned—my writings as a law teacher […] ten years of briefs filed when I was a courtroom advocate […] numerous articles and speeches on that same theme; thirteen years of opinions—counting the unpublished together with the published opinions, well over seven hundred of them—all decisions I made as a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia; several comments on the role of judges and lawyers in our legal system (185).

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Ginsburg’s biographers make it clear, however, that the writings she describes in this passage were just the most recent examples of her work. Ginsburg started writing for the public at least by the time she was 13 and the editor of her school paper. In college, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Cornell newspaper that demonstrated the same measured, thoughtful tone that characterized her later writings in famous legal briefs and opinions. When those seeking to vet her work as part of her nomination to the Supreme Court asked for items she had authored, Ginsburg, a careful documentarian, had all her previous writings at hand.

As she noted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, these writings were part-in-parcel of her “waypaving” work as an equal rights litigator. In 1971, by which time she had already been a professor of procedural law—starting at age 30—in the Rutgers Law School for nine years, Ginsburg authored the first of 24 briefs to appear before the Supreme Court. The 1970s proved a watershed decade for Ginsburg, as she became the director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Women’s Rights Project. In 1973 she presented her first oral argument before the Supreme Court. Throughout the decade she appeared six times before the Supreme Court, winning five of those cases. Her history of highly literate writing and courtroom advocacy made Ginsburg a prospective justice unlike any other going back to the nomination of civil right litigator Thurgood Marshall.

Social Context: The US Supreme Court

Over the course of her life, Supreme Court justice was the longest job Ginsburg held—27 years. As the book reveals, the justice showed particular interest in explaining the court to the average citizen. She describes its traditions, physical setting, regular activities, various processes, and especially the efforts the justices make to maintain collegiality. Ginsburg, only the second woman to sit on the court, demonstrates a detailed knowledge of its history, both the history of its significant decisions and the history of those who sat on the court. This knowledge allows her to pronounce that the court, like the nation and the Constitution, is a living, evolving institution. In describing the reluctance of the male founders to include women in the Constitution—even after empowering formerly enslaved people to be citizens, Ginsburg observes that the nation and the founders were simply not yet ready. She quotes both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the second and third US presidents, as being wary of women in leadership roles.

Ginsburg tracks the slow process of women attaining judgeships until President Ronald Reagan fulfilled a campaign promise by nominating Sandra Day O’Connor for the Supreme Court in 1981. When Ginsburg joined her on the court 12 years later, O’Connor served as a mentor, explaining the traditions and procedures of the justices. Gradually, Ginsburg rose to become the most senior justice following the death of Justice Scalia. Among those justices perceived as liberal, Ginsburg was the senior voice, often assigning other justices the responsibility for writing dissenting opinions. Ginsburg continued throughout her years of service to depict the court as a human institution where scholarly justices weigh legal precedents, often refining and even changing their opinions.