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Directed/produced by:  Betsy West and Julie Cohen

With:  Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Lilly Ledbetter, Sharron Frontiero, Clara Spera, Jane C. Ginsburg, James Ginsburg, Nina Totenberg, Bill Clinton

Running time:  97 minutes

 

It somehow seems as if the Supreme Court is more in the public consciousness now than a half-century ago. Perhaps a few major Court cases began catching public attention in a big way, such as Brown v. the Board of Education or, even more so, Roe v. Wade.  Perhaps it was a few scandals involving the Court, such as the hearings with Anita Hill.  Reportedly, most Americans are unable to name any Supreme Court justices, but it would seem that surely most people would at least be familiar with the name of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg–now fondly dubbed The Notorious RBG, with a nod to the rapper The Notorious BIG–is surely the justice most in the public consciousness these days.  Not due to any pushy self-aggrandizement on her part–on the contrary, she is continually described as soft-spoken and shy.  But for a few years she was the only woman on the Supreme Court after Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement, a diminutive figure with her lacy jabot adorning her black judicial robes and–as this documentary shows–she had been quietly making history with ground-breaking cases.

Unlike some other documentaries, this does not offer startling stories, new insights, or shocking revelations.  It is a straightforward biography, mostly a professional biography–indeed, something of a hagiography.  But there is still a heavy emphasis on the personal side, short on interviews with legal scholars, and long on comments from friends and family. Nevertheless, it clearly makes the inescapable point that although many of Ginsburg’s major cases aren’t among the most broadly recognizable titles like Roe or Miranda, they include some of the basic incremental contemporary building blocks of women’s rights.

The most intriguing aspect is the brief glimpse of her early life.  Her supportive, inspirational mother died when Ginsburg was only 17, but had instilled in her two fundamental precepts:  1)Always be a lady, never stooping to useless emotions such as anger, and 2)Always be independent, being able to fend for yourself.  The lessons stood her in good stead, fostering her persistence in the face of adversity and discouragement.

She was lucky in going to Cornell University where the men so outnumbered the women, four to one, that “if a girl couldn’t find a man there, she was hopeless.”  RBG, a very lovely young woman, didn’t lack for dates.  And, as she says, meeting her future husband, Martin Ginsburg, was the most fortunate thing that ever happened to her.  He was not only fun and gregarious, but an astonishingly avant-la-lettrefeminist himself, who appreciated her brains and was uxoriously supportive for their entire half-century together.  Not only did he shoulder the kitchen duties after their children demanded that RBG be barred from cooking the family meals, he also readily abandoned his prestigious New York job and moved the family to Washington, DC when she was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals there in 1980.

At the time she was setting out, in the 1950s, a woman planning a law career could expect perpetual obstacles, and as she rose in the legal hierarchy, she was, of course, hyper-aware that in many ways women were still “second-class citizens.”  They were unwelcome in law schools, and law firms were very open in saying they didn’t hire women.  She had been turned down at every law firm where she’d applied, and was teaching at Rutgers when the ACLU reached out to her in 1963, hoping she’d join them on a particular project.  In Frontiero v. Richardson, Sharron Frontiero had been unpleasantly surprised to learn that she wasn’t entitled to the same housing allowance as her male counterparts. That was RBG’s first Supreme Court appearance and her first major victory, and she started in on the half-dozen cases for which she became known, and by which she gradually expanded rights to the point where they are accepted today.

When President Clinton had the opportunity to appoint a new justice to the Supreme Court, Ginsburg, so quiet and restrained, would not have stood out among the potential candidates–except that her husband was so convinced of her rightness that he lobbied persistently on her behalf and, as Clinton says, he knew within minutes of meeting her that she was the ideal choice.  She felt that her core mission was to educate her male Court colleagues about gender discrimination, as it was something that hadn’t really occurred to them.  She viewed herself, she says, as the equivalent of a kindergarten teacher.  She even influenced views, and subsequent law, when not on the winning side, as when she dissented in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, when the Court’s verdict did not support the argument requiring women’s pay to equal men’s, but a decade later the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was enshrined into law.

At the same time, the film takes great pleasure in more playful details:  the explosion of RBG memes, the unexpected sight of her working out at the gym, her collection of decorative collars (she points out one that she wears for majority opinions and one specifically for dissents), her custom-tailored role in an opera (the imperious Duchess of Crakentorp in The Daughter of the Regiment), her adorably improbable friendship with ultra-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia (seen riding on an elephant!), her children wondering whether she even knows how to turn on a television.

This does not aspire to be a particularly scholarly or in-depth biography, and anyone hoping for a critical, analytical look will be disappointed.  But for all of us who didn’t quite realize the scope and importance of her work, it’s made clear just why she commands such admiration and affection.  As Lilly Ledbetter herself says, “She may be small, but she’s got a firm backbone.”