Review: ‘Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’
Ms. Carmon does a fine job of showing how shrewd Justice Ginsburg was as a women’s rights lawyer, deliberately taking on male plaintiffs who had been disenfranchised in their caregiver roles. Through a discreet back door, she established a meaningful body of law that said neither men’s nor women’s rights should be determined or limited by sex.
.. In 1993, she gave a famous(one might say notorious) lecture that decried Roe v. Wade because the decision “invited no dialogue with legislators,” but wiped out, in a single stroke, every state’s abortion law.
Ms. Carmon mentions this lecture. But as the book winds down, she does not so much as remark upon — much less reckon with — the idea that Justice Ginsburg’s belief in incrementalism might live in tension with her recent votes on marriage equality, which invalidated many state laws and made no overtures to state legislatures at all.