At first, she tells the journalist, she thought there must be something wrong with her. When she graduated from Columbia Law School, having transferred there from Harvard, Bader Ginsburg tied for first place in her class, yet for a long time couldn’t find a job. In that first interview, Bader Ginsburg displayed many of the qualities that would come to inspire, in her later years, not just respect, but a kind of devotion and a fame unusual for one in her line of work. One also gets to see the evolution of a star. No law firm, in 1959, wanted to hire a woman, even one as brilliant as Bader Ginsburg Reading Bader Ginsburg’s comments gives one slight vertigo – to encounter her as a young woman and see, for a second, the entire arc of her life, right up to her death – and an intimacy with the justice that a more conventional retrospective might lack. The year is 1972 and it is the first time Columbia has chosen a woman for a full-time post higher than lecturer. When we meet Bader Ginsburg, it is as a 38-year-old speaking to the New York Times on the occasion of her accepting a professorship at Columbia University. It’s a wonderfully wide-ranging and unmediated way to engage with each subject and to be transported back to their earliest ventures in public life.

This book, marketed as The Last Interview, is part of a series of interview compilations with late thinkers and writers that features, among others, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron and Hannah Arendt.

The story of Bader Ginsburg’s rise from one of nine women in her class at Harvard Law School to a justice on the supreme court and a beloved American figure, becomes no less astonishing the more times one revisits it.īader Ginsburg died in September this year, at the age of 87. The most she could aspire to, the late justice tells us, in one of seven interviews that make up this timely and inspiring book, was to earn her living as a lawyer, but even that was no foregone conclusion. W hen Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated from law school in 1959, women made up 3% of lawyers in the US and there were no women judges on the federal courts of appeal.

Images ruth bader ginsburg