Claire Jeffers’s Reviews > Dissenter on the Bench: Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Life and Work > Status Update

"The genius of our Constitution," she said in February 2018, "is that this concept of "We the people' has become ever more embracive." Our Constitution "is still being perfected but is ever more inclusive."

"Her message was simple: separate was not equal. Girls needed to have identical opportunities boys had, in exactly the same setting, with exactly the same offerings.

Sarah Grimke: "I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks."

The Juneau school authorities ultimately changed their minds when Joe's father protested that the suspension would be a violation of Joe's constitutionally protected rights of free expression."

"On another occasion, Joe refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the school day, turning his chair around so that his back was to the flag. The school authorities threatened him with a five day suspension, even though, almost 60 years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled that public schools may not force students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

with women, but only men could participate in the minyan." Traditionally, when observant Jews gather for public worship, they may not begin the formal prayers unless ten men over the age of 13, known as minyan, are present. Young Ruth thought it unfair she and her female relatives and neighbors had to wait to say the prayers of mourning until there were enough men present for them to begin."

"Ruth learned from her mother's experiences as well as her own about the ways in which some of the practices of Judaism held women back or set up unfair rules and expectations.
Ruth had been dismayed to learn as a child that she would not be eligible for a bar mitzvah when she turned thirteen because she was a girl. And when Celia died, leaving 17yo Ruth motherless, Ruth was angered because "the house was filled

"In a landmark case forty years earlier involving junior and senior high school students who were expressing their opposition to the war in Vietnam by wearing black armbands, The Supreme Court had stated clearly, "Students do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

"Joe's classmates watched this exchange from the sidelines. They were not impressed by the school authorities. A student reported, "People were mostly amused by the way the administrators reacted, how they got on their walkie-talkies and called for backup."