An informal portrait of Justice Ginsburg, drawing on a series of her conversations with Rosen, starting in the 1990s and continuing through the Trump era. Rosen, a veteran legal journalist, scholar, and president of the National Constitution Center, shares with readers the justice's observations on a variety of topics both personal and professional.
... will surely entice the many who can’t get enough of our country’s most meme-able jurist ... readers who come for RBG’s Greatest Hits will end up getting something richer: At its best, Conversations makes you feel like a student in the world’s coolest law school seminar, with Ginsburg and Rosen deftly leading you through constitutional clauses and case law to elucidate how the court works and why it matters ... Rosen’s familiarity with his leading lady pays off. The two have an easy repartee ... ome of the biographical anecdotes here are well-known to RBG obsessives ... More satisfying are Rosen and Ginsburg’s dives into the substance of Supreme Court jurisprudence. Rosen, a professor at George Washington University Law School and the president of the National Constitution Center, is as skilled as Ginsburg at laying out legal concepts for nonexpert readers without dumbing them down so far that an appellate litigator would scoff ... for the legally minded progressives who’ve already added it to their holiday wish lists, Conversations is anything but a downer. Ginsburg, 86, speaks of her cancer battles this year with inspiring toughness ... For those who don’t have Rosen’s good fortune to join her at an opera, the vision of an energized RBG zipping around the country right up to the next presidential election makes for a pretty nice liberal dream sequence, too.
To anyone who believes Supreme Court justices speak only in pronouncements handed down like chiseled tablets from Mount Sinai, Jeffrey Rosen’s Conversations With RBG will come as a revelation. Drawn from eight public and private interviews conducted over the past decade, these candid and often deeply personal conversations provide insight into the life of a woman who has gracefully navigated the roles of passionate advocate, discerning judge and loving wife and mother ... [Rosen's] questions in this book are well-informed but friendly, designed to draw out the naturally diffident Ginsburg rather than to provoke controversy ... Ginsburg, ever the optimist, believes we’re 'constantly forming a more perfect Union, which is what the Founders intended.' Conversations With RBG is an enlightening look at her vital contribution to that process.
Ginsburg’s passages are powerful and enlightening, but what this book offers about Ginsberg’s personal history and judicial philosophy has largely been addressed in other books and interviews ... Libraries with patrons keenly interested in the Supreme Court, especially those serving law, political science, and American history students, will find this a compelling addition. For those eager to add a new resource on the Justice, this book provides a solid introduction to her life and thoughts on the American legal system.
