Ruth Bader Ginsburg blinked behind giant, round eyeglasses. It was the first day of her confirmation hearings, in July of 1993, the year after the Year of the Woman, and Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was very pleased to see her. Keen to do penance for the debacle of the Clarence Thomas hearings, just two years before—the year before the Year of the Woman—when an all-male committee, chaired by Biden, failed to credit what Anita Hill had to say about George H. W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, he could hardly have been friendlier to Bill Clinton’s nominee, a much respected and widely admired sixty-year-old appellate judge. She sat with the stillness of a watchful bird. “Judge Ginsburg, welcome,” Biden said, heartily. “And, believe me, you are welcome here this morning.”

He had more reasons, too, to beam at Ginsburg. Only weeks earlier, Clinton had withdrawn his nomination of Lani Guinier as Assistant Attorney General, an abandonment that had followed the very new President’s unsuccessful nominations of two female Attorneys General, Kimba Wood and Zoë Baird. Clinton and Biden needed a successful, high-profile female appointment, one without a discussion of pubic hair or video porn or nannies. On the way to work on the first day of the Ginsburg hearings, Biden had read the New York Times on the train and found that there was no mention of Ginsburg on page 1, or page 2, or page 3, which, he told Ginsburg, “was the most wonderful thing that has happened to me since I have been chairman of this committee.” He flashed his movie-star grin.

During that first session, scheduled for two and a half hours, the committee members—sixteen men and two lately added women—did nearly all the talking, delivering opening statements. Not until the outset of the second session did Biden sidle up to a question. “The Constitution has to be read by justices in light of its broadest and most fundamental commitments, commitments to liberty, commitments to individual dignity, equality of opportunity,” he said, putting on his glasses, and taking them off again. Ginsburg blinked and stared and waited.

Biden’s question concerned a recent speech, the Madison Lecture, in which Ginsburg had said that in making decisions concerning rights not listed in the Constitution judges should be “moderate and restrained” and avoid stepping “boldly in front of the political process,” as he reminded her. “But, Judge,” Biden said, “in your work as an advocate in the seventies you spoke with a different voice. In the seventies, you pressed for immediate extension of the fullest constitutional protection for women under the Fourteenth Amendment, and you said the Court should grant such protection notwithstanding what the rest of society, including the legislative branch, thought about the matter. . . . Can you square those for me or point out their consistency to me?”

What Biden was getting at has been mostly lost in the years since, years during which Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a distinguished Justice, has become a pop-culture feminist icon, a comic-book superhero. In the past year alone, the woman known to her fans as the Notorious R.B.G. has been the subject of a “Saturday Night Live” skit; a fawning documentary; an upcoming bio-pic, “On the Basis of Sex” (from a screenplay written by Ginsburg’s nephew); a CNN podcast, “RBG Beyond Notorious”; and a new biography, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life” (Knopf), by Jane Sherron De Hart, an emeritus history professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Such lavish biographical attention to a living Supreme Court Justice is unusual, and, new, even if that change is easy to lose sight of amid the recent intense scrutiny of the high-school and college years of the Trump nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, who has been accused of sexual assault. (He has denied the allegations.) Unlike candidates for political office, most sitting Justices have preferred to remain, if not anonymous, largely unknown. The position is unelected, the appointment is for life, and the Justices are not supposed to place themselves in the public eye, for fear of making themselves beholden to public opinion: arguably, the less attention to their personal lives the better. Before the past, tumultuous decade, few, if any, Justices who hadn’t previously held an elected office had been the subject of a full-dress biography while still serving on the Court.

Writing a biography of a sitting Justice introduces all kinds of problems of perspective, authority, and obligation. Ginsburg has not yet deposited her papers in any archive and, having refused calls to resign under Obama’s watch, says that she has no plans to retire. De Hart, who began the project fifteen years ago, relied on published material, public records, and, extensively, interviews. Her publisher describes the book as “written with the cooperation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” It would have been impossible to write the book without that coöperation, but it comes at no small cost.

Making De Hart’s problems worse is Ginsburg’s unprecedented judicial celebrity. On Matt Groening’s animated series “Futurama,” Ginsburg appeared as an artificially preserved head, and although Antonin Scalia’s severed head made a cameo or two as well, it was the Ginsburg character’s catchphrase—“You Ruth Bader believe it!”—that ended up on T-shirts and coffee mugs, and is the thing your teen-ager says to you at the dinner table. This winter, Ginsburg, eighty-five, did her daily workout with Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show.” “I’m a huge fan!” Colbert said. Thurgood Marshall never lifted weights with Johnny Carson. This summer, three goats were brought to Montpelier to eat the poison ivy spreading throughout the Vermont state capital: they are named Ruth, Bader, and Ginsburg. To my knowledge, no flock of sheep were ever named Oliver, Wendell, and Holmes.

God bless Ruth Bader Ginsburg, goats, bobbleheads, and all. But trivialization—R.B.G.’s workout tips! her favorite lace collars!—is not tribute. Female heroes are in short supply not because women aren’t brave but because female bravery is demeaned, no kind more than intellectual courage. Isn’t she cute? Ginsburg was and remains a scholar, an advocate, and a judge of formidable sophistication, complexity, and, not least, contradiction and limitation. It is no kindness to flatten her into a paper doll and sell her as partisan merch.

Doing so also obscures a certain irony. Ginsburg often waxes nostalgic about her confirmation hearings, as she did this September, when, regretting the partisan furor over Brett Kavanaugh—even before Christine Blasey Ford came forward—she said, “The way it was was right; the way it is is wrong.” The second of those statements is undeniably and painfully true, but the first flattens the past. What Biden was getting at, in 1993, was what the President himself had said, dismissing the idea of nominating Ginsburg when it was first suggested to him. “The women,” Clinton said, “are against her.”

Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn in 1933. At thirteen, she wrote a newspaper editorial, a tribute to the Charter of the United Nations. Her mother, an admirer of Eleanor Roosevelt, died when she was seventeen. Bader went to Cornell, where she liked to say that she learned how to write from Vladimir Nabokov. At Cornell, she also met Martin Ginsburg, and fell in love. They married in 1954 and had a baby, Jane, in 1955. Brilliant and fiercely independent, Ginsburg was devoted to Marty, to Jane, and to the law. At Harvard Law School, which first admitted women in 1950, she was one of only nine women in a class of some five hundred. In one of the first scenes in “On the Basis of Sex,” Erwin Griswold, the dean of the law school, asks each of those nine women, during a dinner party at his house, why she is occupying a place that could have gone to a man. In the film, Ginsburg, played by Felicity Jones, gives the dean an answer to which he can have no objection: “My husband, Marty, is in the second-year class. I’m at Harvard to learn about his work. So that I might be a more patient and understanding wife.” This, which is more or less what Ginsburg actually said, was a necessary lie. It was possible for a woman to attend law school—barely—but it was not possible for her to admit her ambition.