A lot has happened in the intervening 64 years to make the way things were appear so outlandish as to be scarcely believable to the young women who have turned Ruth Ginsburg into a matriarchal icon, surely one of the culture’s most unlikely rock stars. Was she really one of only nine women out of 552 students in her Harvard Law School class of 1959? Can it be true that, tied for first in her class at Columbia Law School (to which she transferred in her final year, in order to be with her husband in New York City), she couldn’t find a job after graduation? When she began her teaching career in 1963, were there really only 18 female tenured law professors in the entire country? Believe it, millennials.

Image Ginsburg with two grandchildren in 1993. Credit... Reuters

The journey from then to now, in society in general and law in particular, is well documented. And Ginsburg’s role in the law-related aspects of that transformation will be familiar, at least in general terms, to anyone drawn to this weighty book (546 pages of text and 111 pages of endnotes, to say nothing of the bibliography and index). Readers will know of the young lawyer’s pathbreaking (or, as she might put it, “way paving”) litigation campaign that persuaded the nine men of the Supreme Court, step by tentative step, to create an entirely new jurisprudence of sex equality.

The question for any Ginsburg biography — and there will be others, including a long-anticipated authorized one by Wendy Williams and Mary Hartnett of Georgetown Law School, still some years down the road — is not only what happened, but why. Why Ruth Ginsburg? Why this quiet woman whose conversation was marked by long awkward pauses, whose academic passion was for civil procedure and who “never had the slightest intention of becoming an expert on discrimination law and equal protection analysis”? The young women who hang on her every dissenting opinion and who tattoo her image, complete with lace jabot, onto their arms may be tempted to reduce her life’s trajectory to a tale of “don’t get mad, get even,” but as this book amply demonstrates, it’s a good deal more elusive than that.