The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. By Scott Dodson, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 314 pp. $29.99 cloth.

• Published date: 01 December 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12241
• Date: 01 December 2016

Tomer-Fishman, Tamara (2010) “Cultural Defense”, “Cultural Offense” or No Culture

at All?: An Empirical Examination of Israeli Judicial Decision in Cultural Conflict

Criminal Cases and of the Factors Affecting Them,” 100 J. Criminal Law and Crimi-

nology 475–521.

Wong, Charmaine M. (1999) “Good Intentions, Troublesome Applications: The Cultur-

al Defence and Other Uses of Cultural Evidence in Canada,” 42 The Criminal Law

Q. 367–96.

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The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. By Scott Dodson, ed. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2015. 314 pp. $29.99 cloth.

Reviewed by Susan Burgess, Department of Political Science, Ohio

University

Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Law professor. Gener-

al Counsel for the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. Pop culture

icon. As Scott Dodson puts it, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s “impact on

the law over the last half-century cannot be overstated” (p. ix).

While her successful challenges to gender norms and her fiery dis-

sents on behalf of voting rights and equal pay are the source of

much of her popular acclaim, this fine collection of essays also

explores her contributions to the fields of federal procedure, juris-

diction, federalism, international law, criminal procedure, and tax

law. The collection is divided into four parts: Shaping a Legacy,

Rights and Remedies, Structuralism, and The Jurist. As is perhaps

befitting a collection devoted to detailing her wide-ranging legacy,

contributors include law professors, media stars, a practitioner, a

historian, a sitting judge and even a short previously published

piece penned by Ginsburg herself.

As contributor and Legal Affairs Correspondent for National

Public Radio Nina Totenberg succinctly suggests Ginsburg

“changed the way the world is for American women” (p. 4). Slate

Magazine Senior Editor Dahlia Lithwick notes that it has become

somewhat clich

e to refer to Ginsburg as “the Thurgood Marshall of

Women’s Rights” (p. 222). Many of the essays in this collection

detail exactly how this shift took place, emphasizing the careful

legal, professional, and personal strategies that Ginsburg employed,

slowly but surely upending gender norms that had oppressed wom-

en for years. The collection includes several essays that show just

how pervasive those sexist norms were in both private and public

life, and how they were addressed by Ginsburg as a law professor,

Book Reviews 1043