Long before she became ​“Noto­ri­ous,” Ruth Bad­er Gins­burg was an attor­ney argu­ing gen­der equal­i­ty cas­es before the U.S. Supreme Court. The cas­es she won in the 1970s changed the mean­ing of the Con­sti­tu­tion, adding legal equal­i­ty for women to it. That is the rea­son RBG became the first Jew­ish Amer­i­can and the first woman to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol.

Most Amer­i­cans have a men­tal pic­ture of RBG as an elder­ly woman with over­sized glass­es and a judi­cial col­lar. In fact, she was a stun­ning, and stun­ning­ly bril­liant, young lawyer who drew upon her Jew­ish her­itage to insist that con­fin­ing women – and men – to stereo­typ­i­cal roles vio­lat­ed their rights as human beings. She took as her mis­sion what she described as giv­ing the all-male Supreme Court the equiv­a­lent of a grade-school edu­ca­tion in the ways both women and men were hurt by a reliance on out­mod­ed notions about prop­er gen­der roles. The book, writ­ten in lan­guage acces­si­ble to the gen­er­al pub­lic, details the human sto­ries behind the cases.