Any effort to shoehorn this photographer into a bright-line “good” or “bad” role is futile. He is both complicit and resistant, callous voyeur and daring partisan documentarian. Lower labors for 171 pages to dissect every inch and angle of the photograph. And she succeeds in many ways. But her odyssey to identify the victims falls short. They remain nameless, just as many of Lower’s other questions go unanswered. Perhaps that is the point. There will never be closure, and we need to stop searching for it. Jon M. Sands is the federal public defender for the District of Arizona. Nickolas Smith is an assistant federal public defender in the Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Public Defender for the District of Arizona. Smith graduated in 2019 from the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University. He then clerked for Hon. David D. Weinzweig at the Arizona Court of Appeals before joining the Federal Public Defender. He has long studied the Holocaust and previously traveled to several related sites in Europe.
Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union By Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Amanda L. Tyler University of California Press 2021 288 pp $26.95
Reviewed by Elizabeth Kelley
It has been over a year since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Her passing has been
mourned for a variety of reasons. Some mourn the passing of a towering figure in the world of sex discrimination law. Some mourn the passing of a historic figure—the second woman on the U.S. Supreme Court and the first Jewish woman. Some miss a reliable vote on what is called the Court’s liberal block. And some simply miss the pop culture icon, fondly known as the Notorious RBG, who was the co-author of The RBG Workout Book and the subject of the hit movie On the Basis of Sex. Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue encompasses all that, plus a deep affection for a woman who was a friend and mentor to many. Amanda L. Tyler was a clerk to Justice Ginsburg during the October 1999 term and is now a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law. Justice, Justice was intended as a collaboration between Justice Ginsburg and Professor Tyler, but the Justice’s death made it as much a tribute as a collaboration. As Tyler notes in the Preface, Justice Ginsburg died three weeks after they submitted the manuscript to the University of California Press. The inspiration for the book was a memorial to Herma Kay Hill, the legendary dean of UC Berkeley Law School and a friend and colleague of Justice Ginsburg. The two co-authored the first casebook on gender-based discrimination law in 1974. As such, the book contains a tribute to Herma Kay Hill by Justice Ginsburg as well as a wide-ranging interview of the Justice by Tyler. Both of those took place on the occasion of the first Herma Kay Hill Memorial Lecture in October 2019. Aside from a touching Introduction and Afterward by Tyler, the book is a rare lens into the mind and preferences of Justice Ginsburg. In a section titled “Ruth Bader Ginsburg the Advocate,” Justice Ginsburg selects her three favorite cases when she appeared before the Supreme Court: Moritz v. Commission of Internal Revenue, Frontiero v. Richardson, and Weinberger v. Wisenfeld. In the following section, the Justice selects four opinions from her service on the High Court: United States v. Virginia (VMI), Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Shelby County v. Holder, and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (Regarding the selection of these opinions, the Justice says it’s like being asked which of her grandchildren is her favorite.) The book concludes with three of her speeches, including one helpful to appellate lawyers titled “Lessons Learned from Louis D. Brandeis.” Also included
are the remarks Dean Hill made in support of Ginsburg at her Senate confirmation hearings in 1993, wherein she stated that her friend and colleague would truly be worthy of the title “Justice.” The book’s title derives from a verse from Deuteronomy—“Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue”—which Ginsburg hung in her chambers. And, as Tyler notes in the Introduction, the subtitle (“A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union”) derives from Ginsburg’s VMI opinion, wherein she stated that the work to build “a more perfect Union” “remains ongoing.” (p. 12). By now, thanks to Justice Ginsburg’s biography, it is well-known that she was the daughter of first-generation Jews in Brooklyn, that her mother died when she was a teenager, and that she attended Cornell, where she met her eventual husband Martin (Marty) Ginsburg. We know of her days at Harvard Law School, where she was one of nine woman. We know about the young couple’s struggle as Marty battled cancer treatments while they were both in law school, her difficulty finding a job after graduation because of her gender, her ground-breaking work for the ACLU in the area of gender discrimination, her appointment to the DC Circuit Court, and her 27 terms on the Supreme Court bench. What distinguishes Justice, Justice from other books about Ginsburg is, first, that it shows how the aspects of her personal life shaped her professional success, and, second, it reveals the abiding affection many like Tyler have for her. The most significant force in Ginsburg’s life was her husband, partner, and Rock of Gibraltar, Martin Ginsburg. Martin Ginsburg was himself a noted tax lawyer. As Justice Ginsburg notes in her interview with Tyler, “he was the first boy I ever dated who cared I had a brain.” (p. 31). Indeed, Marty was the one who gave his young wife the advance sheets laying forth the problem with the IRS faced by Charles E. Moritz, and Marty was the unwavering advocate of all her professional endeavors. In her interview with Tyler, Justice Ginsburg states, “My number one advice is choose a partner in life who thinks that your work is as important as his.” (p. 39). She also shares the advice her mother-in-law gave her: “It helps every now and then to be a little deaf.” (p. 32). Tyler’s affection for Justice Ginsburg, her boss, and, later, her mentor and friend is palpable. She recounts Justice Ginsburg’s
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