Sisters in Law audiobook

This nonfiction reading group pick is subtitled How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went To The Supreme Court And Changed The World. It was a hard book to read for me because all I know about law and courts I learned from watching Perry Mason as a kid and reading thrillers. While the story of the first two women to serve as Justices of the Supreme Court is exciting stuff, I had some trouble following all the cases. However, some years ago I tried to read The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin and was defeated. Linda Hirshman managed to crack the code for me and I appreciate that a great deal. Now I understand how that court works.I knew more about RBG, having seen both the 2018 documentary RBG as well as the 2018 movie On The Basis Of Sex. I knew virtually nothing about Sandra Day O'Connor except that she was the first (FWOTSC) and served as a swing vote between the conservative and liberal justices. This book goes into great detail about each woman and the friendship between them. They were quite different in some ways.What I enjoyed most was learning about the clear intention of RBG to change conditions for women in a deliberate sequence of cases designed to change precedents. Compared to many other things in life, her method is slow. It takes years and decades. Her belief is that if you want to change society you must change the laws. She has done that!I am very glad I read this book. While the fight for equality is a long slog and while the ingrained, unexamined prejudices about women held by men makes me spitting angry, I could see how her method has worked. I felt some hope. Also we now have three women on the court: RBG, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Another curious fact is that all nine justices are either Catholic or Jewish.Now all of her work is at risk. With the conservatives in the majority on the court, much of what she has done in setting precedents at least makes it more difficult for those conservatives to send us backward. I have begun keeping track of the cases heard through a great website, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog.Our reading group discussion was wonderful. We are all liberals, several work in the legal world and we are all women, of course!

Admittedly, this might not be as 'riveting' for non-lawyers but for me it read like a legal thriller.

This is a new book out that was a perfect fit for my reading project of the Supreme Court. The author Linda Hirshman received her law degree and Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Chicago. She practiced law and appeared before the Supreme Court then became a law professor at Brandeis University. In 2002 she retired and now has become a well known author.I have read biographies about both O’Connor and Ginsburg, but this book excels in portraying the enormous obstacles both women encountered by women attempting to enter the legal field. O’Connor and Ginsburg both attended top-tier law schools and graduated at the top of their respective classes. Nonetheless, both struggled to obtain their first professional jobs. They were very different people, O’Connor the politician and Ginsburg the tactician and legal scholar, but they respected each other and frequently worked together on cases before the Court.Hirshman examines not just their role in reframing the culture of the Supreme Court and the tenor of some aspects of the law, but also their work on specific issues such as affirmative action and sex discrimination. The summary at the end was very depressing to me. To listen to a step by step list of the rights women have fought for being taken away, along with the rights regarding racial discrimination and voting. I guess I have lived long enough to go full circle and ended up where I started. It makes me depressed and angry. I have talked with some young women and they have no idea what we went through, so they now have the opportunity to enter most any professions they wish. They can now rent a car and have a credit card in their name; I could not when I was their age, only men had that right. Sexual and racial discrimination including harassment are on the increase lately as is anti-Semitism. I sure hope that people wake up and stop the eroding of the hard fought gains toward equality, but it sure looks discouraging. It may come about that these young women I talked with will need to fight for their rights all over again.The book is superbly written and researched and is packed with information in an easy to read fashion. The book is written for both the layman and the scholar to enjoy. I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. Andrea Gallo did a good job narrating the book.

This is a stunning and insightful review of the careers of Sandra Day O'Connor, the first women on SCOTUS, and the second woman,Ruth Bader Ginsburg. On the surface, the two are as different as chalk and cheese, Sandra a stalwart Westerner with little interest in real feminism other than the fact that she quietly fought her way up the ladder from a traditional country club wife and mother to a member of the court. However, and while she was recognized as the reliable swing vote in many cases, her legacy is more about being in the right place at the right time and not ticking off her fellow justices. Ginsburg, on the other h a n d, has built her career on rocking the boat and, in so doing, has become a mythic figure to young people and especially young feminists. The tiny, fragile looking justice, an upper East Side liberal to her core, speaks for the underdog, unfailingly and has,in this Conservative court, become the modern Brandeis, the reliable voice of dissent. I had not realized, until now, thAt Bush v. Gore, perhaps the court's most controversial decision, essentially turned on the fact that O'Connor wanted to leave the bench and could not do it if Gore, the Democrat, was elected. There is nothing dry or pedantic about this book. It is, in fact, a page turner and a necessary read for any woman who cares about the fact that the Conservative men still see women as less than men, with a G-d given duty only to home and children. I have never been prouder of a "sister" than of the Notorious RBG after reading about her steadiness to the rights of all Americans. This should be required reading for every young person born after the Feminist movement to show them how hard people fought and must fight lest we lose the gains that have been made. Highly recommended

Nearly five stars. This is a book with an agenda. This is not merely a biography of these two Supreme Court Justices, though it does cover quite a bit of biographical information. This is a book about feminism and the women's legal civil rights movement. The decisions and careers are described through the lens of the effect on women and women's rights. The author is unapologetic about her view that women should be treated as full, dignified, equal participants in setting their own destinies. That women should have control over their own reproductive decisions as a facet of that equality. That women should be treated as equals under the law, protected from harassment and discrimination in the workplace. These positions are the starting point here. They aren't open to debate in this book - Hirshman isn't here to discuss whether it wouldn't be better for society if women were protected in their roles as mothers. She's openly critical of decisions that veer from this path. Thus, this is a book that praises Ginsberg more than O'Connor as the bolder advocate of women's rights. There's plenty of gossipy stories here - information from former clerks and from the private papers of various Justices. Sometimes the book veers into chattiness instead of a more academic examination of a body of law. Sometimes (but not often) the author oversimplifies the issues being decided in the cases described. But these are minor quibbles in what is really an impressive and generally academic book.But mostly, there's a really interesting and compelling theme of how the life experiences of these women impacted their opinions. And how their opinions (and changes thereto) can be tracked through their decisions. And how different approaches to the politics of decisions complemented one another.The narrator for the audiobook does a good job with the text, though not a particularly memorable one.Highly recommended, especially to lawyers, and especially to women lawyers.

I learned a lot in this book about Justices O'Connor and Ginsburg, their lives before serving on the Court, and their bodies of work in general. Both of these women graduated from law school at the top of their classes in the 1950s, and neither one could find work in a law firm. No one would hire a woman at the time, and no judges would hire a woman clerk. O'Connor worked for free for a time, and Ginsburg ended up in academia at first. Incredible how much has changed in 50 years and how much of that change we owe to these 2 women. I can relate to Justice O'Connor in her more conservative politics and background and to why she did some of the things she did as a legislator and judge. I also have great respect and admiration for Justice Ginsburg and am really just now realizing how much I personally have benefited from her work in advancing women's rights. Coming from a conservative background, I have been told my whole life that Justice Ginsburg is practically the devil, but I wonder where women would be today had she not worked to pioneer equal rights for women. Her work to expand the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment to include sex discrimination and also her groundwork that led to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act have both affected me personally, and I have personally benefited from this work. I don't think any woman today can say she does not benefit from this work. I also appreciated learning about the relationship between these 2 very different women, their respect for each other, and how they often worked together on the Court. This author describes their work for women's rights as O'Connor playing defense while Ginsburg played offense. A pretty good way to describe it. I will be looking for some more books on these 2 extraordinary and fascinating women.

While I have long been an admirer of Sandra Day O’Connor and curious about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I knew the barest facts about both. This book richly illustrates their path to the Supreme Court. Both had very different journeys and those journeys deeply impacted their time on the court. I learned so much and enjoyed every minute of listening to this audiobook I highly recommend it to those who have an interest in the law, history or the development of women.

I seldom do a real review of the books I read. Most of them are strictly for my own entertainment and really don't have much redeeming social value. This book, however, is different.I have probably spent more time in a court room than most trial lawyers because of directing the CASA program (Court Appointed Special Advocates) for abused and neglected children and then as the Family Court Administrator, both for 8 counties in southern Idaho. That and having been married to a judge and often sitting in on the cases before him just as a support to him and because they were interesting. I even attended some Idaho Supreme Court arguments when Bill was filling in for one of the Justices. Once, during a conference in Washington D.C. at which one of our Idaho contingent was Charles Donaldson, at that time Chief Justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, he managed to finagle a private guided tour of the Supreme Court building for us, during which I actually got to sit in Sandra Day O'Connor's (at that time, the only woman on the Court) chair on the bench. So I found this double biography of Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be fascinating.I was troubled during the early part of the book by the favoritism shown to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's role. She and her earlier legal career were discussed in much more detail and much more favorably that O'Connor's was. This may have been a political bias on the part of the author, herself a lawyer and professor of women's studies at Brandeis, certainly one I could agree with, but by the end of the book, that was less of an issue for me.My big takeaway from this book was wondering, had Ginsburg been the first woman on the Court (FWOSC) if there would ever have been an O'Connor not to mention a Sotomayor or a Kagan. I think that had the FWOSC, whom ever that might have been, come in with a tough stance on feminist issues, it might well have closed the doors to future women appointees. I'm not suggesting that Ginsburg would have done that, only giving O'Connor credit for recognizing that she needed to approach things in a more cooperative and less aggressive way than we might have wanted her to do at the time.Most important for me was the carefully thought out and implemented campaign that was waged by both of these women to improve the equality of women in all areas of our society. And for that, I am eternally grateful!

I really enjoyed this dual biography of these two very special women and the struggles they both lived through to get their voices heard in a society that would much prefer for them to be quiet and "stay in their lane". I believe all women no matter who you are stand on their shoulders, specially those of RBG. This book also makes me sad when you realize how much we are losing, that we're all going backwards, not just women but also minorities, the poor, LGBTQ and anyone who doesn't fall in line with the status quo. Unfortunately a lot of young women take the rights and freedoms we still do have for granted, and I'm afraid if we don't find a better way to inspire them to fight it it could all be gone very soon.

I thought that this book did a great job representing both women. While I knew most of the facts about RBG, it was fascinating to learn more about Sandra Day O'Connor, even if my political thoughts do not fully align with the decisions she made. It is clear that Hirshman thoroughly researched both women; she was able to depict each woman fairly and, in my opinion, accurately.

Although it was a slow read, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned a great deal. I cheered as so much progress happened for equal rights, and then wanted to cry as I remembered how many rights have been destroyed with the current supreme court.