Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue

"The title comes from a passage in Deuteronomy that Justice Ginsberg had inscribed in a piece of artwork which she hung in her chambers. It encapsulates the animating principle that defined her contribution to our society. She was very fond of talking about how the Constitution, in its preamble, laid out the work that she undertook, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” She believed that making our country more perfect was work that was always ongoing, and she believed that it was very important for each of us to do our part, to try and build that more perfect union. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The book is a collection of materials that she and I assembled, inspired by a conversation that she and I had last year at the University of California, where we talked about her life, her family, her work as an advocate and her time on the Court. The book includes a number of never-before-published materials from various stages of her life, including some important speeches and some of her very last speeches. It includes her favorite among the hundreds of opinions that she wrote on the Supreme Court. These were the opinions that she thought best represented the work that she did. The Justice was deeply interested in seeing the publication of, and wrote the introduction to, a book by her dear friend Herma Hill Kay, which chronicles the lives of the first 14 women professors in the United States at accredited law schools. A professor named Pat Cain has taken over editing of the manuscript since Herma passed, and is shepherding it to publication. That book will publish alongside Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue . It’s a wonderful chronicling of these female pioneers in legal academia. Herma was the 15th female law professor and Justice Ginsburg was the 19th. When I spoke with her about her time on the two law faculties in which she served, Rutgers and Columbia, there really weren’t any other women around, maybe, at most, one. So, many of the things that she experienced she confronted without a cohort of people who had some of the same experiences. For example, she became pregnant with her second child while working as a law professor on a year-to-year contract at Rutgers Law School. I asked her in our conversation last fall: How does it make you feel to know that at many law schools, including the one where I teach, most of the student body is female? She said, “I’m absolutely overjoyed that now women are so well accepted at the bar.” We’ve made a lot of progress and a lot of that progress is on account of Justice Ginsburg."