Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: My Life's Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s final book offers an intimate look at her extraordinary life and details her lifelong pursuit for gender equality and a “more perfect Union.”

In the fall of 2019, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg visited the University of California, Berkeley School of Law to honor her friend, the late Herma Hill Kay, with whom Ginsburg had coauthored the very first casebook on sex-based discrimination in 1974. During Justice Ginsburg’s visit, she shared her life story with Amanda L. Tyler, a Berkeley Law professor and former Ginsburg law clerk.

Their intimate conversation is recorded here in Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue, along with previously unpublished materials that detail Ginsburg’s long career. These include notable briefs and oral arguments, Ginsburg’s last speeches, and her favorite opinions that she wrote as a Supreme Court Justice (many in dissent), along with the statements that she read from the bench in those important cases. Each document was carefully chosen by Ginsburg and Tyler to tell the litigation strategy at the heart of Ginsburg’s unwavering commitment to achieve “a more perfect Union.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an advocate and jurist for gender equality, ensuring that the United States Constitution leaves no person behind and allows every individual to achieve their full human potential. Her work transformed not just the American legal landscape, but American society. As revealed in these pages, Ginsburg dismantled long-entrenched systems of discrimination based on outdated stereotypes by showing how such laws hold back both genders. With her death, the country lost a hero whose incredible life and legacy made the United States a society in which “We the People,” for whom the Constitution is written, includes everyone.