The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Amanda L. Tyler

Episode Date: May 30, 2021

Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life's Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Amanda L. Tyler Ruth Bader Ginsburg's last book is a curation of her own legacy, tracing the long history of her work for gender equality and a “more perfect Union.” In the fall of 2019, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg visited the University of California, Berkeley School of Law to deliver the first annual Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture in honor of her friend, the late Herma Hill Kay, with whom Ginsburg had coauthored the very first casebook on sex-based discrimination in 1974. Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue is the result of a period of collaboration between Ginsburg and Amanda L. Tyler, a Berkeley Law professor and former Ginsburg law clerk. During Justice Ginsburg's visit to Berkeley, she told her life story in conversation with Tyler. In this collection, the two bring together that conversation and other materials—many previously unpublished—that share details from Justice Ginsburg's family life and long career. These include notable briefs and oral arguments, some of Ginsburg's last speeches, and her favorite opinions that she wrote as a Supreme Court Justice (many in dissent), along with the statements that she read from the bench in those important cases. Each document was chosen by Ginsburg and Tyler to tell the story of the litigation strategy and optimistic vision that were at the heart of Ginsburg's unwavering commitment to the achievement of "a more perfect Union." In a decades-long career, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an advocate and jurist for gender equality and for ensuring that the United States Constitution leaves no person behind. Her work transformed not just the American legal landscape, but American society more generally. Ginsburg labored tirelessly to promote a Constitution that is ever more inclusive and that allows every individual to achieve their full human potential. As revealed in these pages, in the area of gender rights, Ginsburg dismantled long-entrenched systems of discrimination based on outdated stereotypes by showing how such laws hold back both genders. And as also shown in the materials brought together here, Justice Ginsburg had a special ability to appreciate how the decisions of the high court impact the lived experiences of everyday Americans. The passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020 as this book was heading into production was met with a public outpouring of grief. With her death, the country lost a hero and national treasure whose incredible life and legacy made the United States a more just society and one in which “We the People,” for whom the Constitution is written, includes everyone.Amanda L. Tyler is Shannon Cecil Turner Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, where she teaches and writes about the Supreme Court, the federal courts, constitutional law, legal history, and civil procedure. Tyler is the author, with the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life's Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union (University of California Press 2021). She is also the author of many articles and books, including Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay (Oxford University Press 2017). She also serves as a co-editor of the prominent casebook and treatise Hart and Wechsler’s The Federal Courts and the Federal System. Tyler served as a law clerk to the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court of the United States during the October Term 1999.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show hey come here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in be sure to refer the show to your friends neighbors relatives get them all in the show tell them to sign up to the show, download the podcast, subscribe,

and all that good stuff. Today, we have the most amazing guest on the show. I think it's going to blow your mind. We'll get to that in a second, but go to youtube.com, Fortuna's Chris Voss. You can see the video version of this, and also you can go to goodreads.com, Fortuna's Chris Voss. See all the different groups. We have Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitterris foss see all the different groups you have facebook linkedin twitter uh instagram all those different places you can go and check it out today we have an amazing law law legal author on the show so we'll be talking to her about her book that she did with the late ruth bader ginsburg the name of the book is justice thou shalt pursue a life's work fighting for a more perfect union this book came out inth, 2021, and we'll be discussing it with her. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com.

And their Micro-iDSD Signature is a top-of-the-range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two Brown-Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound eradicate noise distortion and hiss from your listening experience check out their new

incredible lineup of dax and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com amanda is the shannon cecil turner professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. She teaches and writes about the Supreme Court, the federal courts, constitutional law, legal history, and civil procedure. She is the author, with this honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of the book we just aforementioned. She is also the author of many articles and books, including Habeas Corpus and Wartime, from the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay. She also serves as the co-editor of the prominent casebook and treatise, Heart and Wexler's, the Federal Courts and Federal System.

She served as a law clerk to the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court of the United States during the term of October 1999. Welcome to the show, Amanda. How are you? I'm well. Thank you for having me on the show. Thank you for coming. We're definitely honored to have you on the show. And what an honor to co-wrote in this book with the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Tell us where to find you on the interwebs and find out more about you. I have my faculty webpage on the UC Berkeley School of Law website, and I am at Professor Amanda Tyler on Twitter. There you go. And so what motivated you to write this book with her?

Well, that's a long story. I'll try and see if I can tell the short version of it. Justice Ginsburg, to my great delight, has come or had come several times to various law schools where I've taught to give speeches and do conversations with me. She did this with many of her law clerks over the years who became academics. In this particular case, it connects to the book because in the fall of 2019, she came to visit UC Berkeley to deliver what we call the first annual Herma Hill K Memorial Lecture. Now that's important because Herma Hill K is very important to the story of our book. Herma was my senior colleague at UC Berkeley, the second woman ever hired onto our faculty. And more importantly, Herma was a decades-long friend of Justice Ginsburg's. The two of them together had

written the very first casebook on sex discrimination and the law in the early 1970s, effectively founding a field, a very important field that saw sea change in American constitutional law in the 1970s. I'm sure we'll talk about that more. How this all connects now to the book is that Herma tragically passed away in 2017. And we created at the law school, a lecture series to honor her. And I invited the justice, I called her the justice, to come and give the first memorial lecture. And to my great delight, but not to my surprise, I should say, because I know how dear Herma was to her, she said yes. And she suggested that we make it a conversation. And so that's what we did. We arranged for me to interview her. And we went back and forth extensively about what we would cover in the

interview, hoping to start with her childhood, talk about her family, her marriage, raising children, and also obviously a great deal about her career. And so that's what we planned out. And in the course of planning this, we learned that the University of California Press was considering publishing Herma's last book, for which Justice Ginsburg had written the introduction. And that book is important because it chronicles the stories of the very first American women law professors, the women who came before Herma and before Justice Ginsburg and paved the way for them. And that book is called Paving the Way, America's First Women Law Professors.

UC Press had previously decided not to publish it, as had another publisher. And we knew that. And we thought, hey, what if we work so hard on this conversation? Why don't we turn our conversation into a book project that lays out the story of Justice Ginsburg's life and offer it exclusively to UC Press if they will agree to publish Herma's book alongside our book. And they very happily agreed. And it is just a great thrill to be able to say that both books released alongside one another this spring from UC Press.

And now both are published. And the last thing I will say, two more things quickly. Herma's book, as I said, has Justice Ginsburg's introduction. We made a point of including Herma's testimony at Justice Ginsburg's confirmation proceedings in our book. And what I love about that is that you have these two books alongside one another, where the two co-authors from the early 1970s are still in conversation. And the other thing that I love about this story is that it is a window into who Justice Ginsburg was. She used her platform to raise the voices of others, and she used her

position to try and ensure that the history of these important women who came before her and Herma would be preserved and told. Yeah, this is beautiful, the way the two books work out and how this honor of the other woman and everything play together. Give us an overarching view of the book, if you would, please. Of course. So we start with the conversation. The conversation is the anchor because it allows for the justice to tell the reader her life story in her own words and what better way to hear it. So that's the anchor. And then what we did is we sat down and we just talked about, okay, what materials could we include that compliment the conversation and allow readers to go deeper into different parts of her life? For example, there's a section

of the book that is focused on her advocacy in the 1970s. When going beyond the pages of the casebook she wrote with Herma, she starts litigating gender discrimination cases and quite a number of cases on behalf of the ACLU. And among other things, argues six cases before the Supreme Court, files brief and countless others, and effectively sees a sea change in the law such that from the start of the 1970s, the Equal Protection Clause is not thought to govern or speak to gender. By the end of the 1970s, the Equal Protection Clause now demands a very high justification for any discrimination in the law on account of gender. And that's largely because of Justice Ginsburg's efforts. So we have briefs and we have annotated transcripts of her favorite Supreme Court oral arguments in the

book from that. Then we have a section on her as a justice. And this is really special because I asked her, I said, what are your very favorite opinions of all the opinions you wrote? And this may not on first blush seem like a big deal, but she was a judge for 40 years, 27 on the Supreme court and 13 on the DC circuit, the federal appellate court, just below the Supreme Court. So in all told, she authored over 1,100 opinions. Out of those, she picked her very favorite four. And so we have those, we have her bench summaries of them, and we have some introductions, hand-holding the reader, explaining why these cases were so important. And in the case of her dissenting, what she was

responding to in terms of the majority opinion, and many of them are dissents, which is something I hope we'll talk about. Then finally, we have her final speeches, the last speeches she gave in the last couple of years of her life. And they're really special because they're very personal. Again, you're hearing her in the first person talk about her life and talk about what were very important influences on her. For example, her Jewish female role models, justices who influenced her, in particular, Louis Brandeis. And she talks very candidly about her family and about her love for this country. And those two are very much intertwined as the book and her comments reveal, because she talks about how this country gave refuge to her family, her parents and grandparents who were fleeing persecution as Jewish people had to do in the lead up to World

War II, and happily they were welcomed into the United States. And I think that is a really important window into Justice Ginsburg and why she was so devoted as a public servant. It's because she loved this country so much. So altogether, sorry, altogether, all of this tells the story of her life. And what we try very consciously to do in compiling the book was to assemble something that would be very accessible, not just something for lawyers, but something that anyone who wanted to understand really what made Justice Ginsburg tick and what she valued and what she was passionate about as a justice, you can pick up this book and you will walk away having a very good feeling about that. So that's what we hope to do. And we also hope to inspire people

to carry on the work that was so important to her. Now she's written a lot of different books or been involved in a lot of different books. I should say, I think there was my own words that was written. How is this book different or set apart than some of the other works or writings of or by her? Yeah. So the other book that she published with her two biographers is My Own Words, as you mentioned, and it's a treasure trove of wonderful materials. It's a lot. It's really for someone who wants to dig very deep into the reserves of Justice Ginsburg's materials. There are just a host of materials in there. What we consciously tried to do with this book was to maybe include a little bit less for the reader who doesn't necessarily want to read everything she's ever written, but

who wants more of an overview and who wants to have, for example, exposure to her laying out in conversation, her life story, as opposed to through a piecemeal assemblage of very large amount of materials. My own words is a treasure trove, as I've said, but ours is maybe a little bit easier to get through. And so that was one of the conscious decisions on our part was to make ours more accessible, if you will. Really, for the true diehard RBG fans, they should get both books, I would say, because they complement one another very nicely. Definitely so. Definitely. So would you, in working with her on this book, would you say that she knew this could be a book that she might never see published or a goodbye final book? Did she know or feel or think that way?

Yeah, I think so. last summer that she was aware that this was likely to come around or after or possibly before she would pass. I think she was very reflective at the time about her life and it made, it would be hard to overstate what a privilege it was to work with her on this because she was thinking back about her life. She was in a frame of mind to think, okay, if someone reads nothing else about me, these are the four opinions, the handful of opinions I want them to read. And they will know who I was and what I fought for. And to be able to have those conversations with her, it just would be hard to overstate how special it was. And it's why I think it's fair to say that the book lays out in many respects, how she hoped to be remembered, what she hoped people would think about and associate with her in terms of her life's work.

You answered the next question I had for you. I mean, it's an interesting, she had such a giant body of work, like you said, 40 years. She was so revered and celebrated, especially in the final years of her life with the notorious RPG. And we kind of rose to this fandom of what would you call viralness and everybody appreciating her. I remember like I or anybody else who was following the media through the last four years of roller coaster, every time we'd hear she gets sick or it's, oh no, she's sick again, or just some new cancer, she was hospitalized. We'd just be like, oh God, no. And I think we all spirited with her when she had that thing where she was like, I'm going to get to the next administration and give them my seat.

And yeah, it's interesting. So when you were writing the book, I guess there was some hope that maybe she would continue on. And now looking back, you can see that she knew where she was going. It's an interesting place to be in where you're sitting now as an author, a coauthor of someone who's no longer with us, and you've been the survivor to be able to tell us a story. What does that feel like? It's not a place I wanted to be, Frank. She was, as you say, she was so important to so many people. And I, what has struck me is how hard the loss is felt by people, friends of mine, for example, who never knew her. Compound that for those of us who did. All of her law clerks, all of her friends and family, just the

loss is so hard. It's still hard. I don't think it's going to get easier for a while. And on the one hand, presenting this book to the world as a celebration of her life and who she was and hopefully as I said to inspire others to join in the work is a very special privilege I feel very grateful to her for bringing me along on this journey I am especially grateful and so happy that people are interested in continuing to talk about her and her legacy and that this book is contributing to that. But I am constantly reminded every time I talk about her and I talk about this work that she is gone and it is a very hard loss. It remains very raw and it remains very hard to process. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. It's tough when we lose people.

And then she was such a national treasure. She really should have lain in state, I think, in the Senate or at the legislative body. And I think McConnell blocked it or something like that. But still, I think hopefully we'll make a monument to her maybe someday or something, something even more. But it's great that we have people like yourself who are surviving, telling the story and everything else. The book in all the different parts that are here. And I think it's beautiful. Just amazing that she broke down those, I think you said it was over a thousand different legal things. And she said, these are the, there's four of them. Is that correct? That I want you to

remember me by and three of the four dissents. Tell us a little bit about why she chose those four. It's interesting. And I can't emphasize this enough. She was emphatic that these were the four because I went back to her several times. I said, gosh, boss. Sometimes I would call her boss even 20 years after the fact. I said, boss, I really, what about this opinion? I really like this opinion that you wrote. She said, no, no, these are the four.

So she was quite fixated on these being the four. And as you say, three of them are dissents. And you could look at that a lot of different ways. You could say, wow, she lost so many big ones. And that is really unfortunate. And it is, but you could also look at that and say, here's someone who was thinking at the end of her life about how she wanted to be remembered and what she wanted this book to achieve. And she chose those dissents, I think, for a reason. wanted to draw attention to the reader, to the fact that there are crucially important areas where she believed the court had really gone off the rails. And she really wanted to make sure that people understood the law was not where it should be with respect to, for example, voting rights and race and gender and reproductive freedom. And she wanted to make sure that the reader would be

inspired to keep fighting the fights that she had waged at the court on those issues or with respect to those issues, even after she was gone. So I think that there very much was a method to the madness of choosing three dissents. It was her way of saying, please keep up the fight. Do you think maybe she hoped that these would eventually get, the sense would eventually get overturned? Yes, very much so. She often talked about her dissents as being the occasion for which she would write for the ages. And you can see, you can imagine what it's like. And I've not been a judge. I've clerked for two judges. So I've worked with them. But when you lose, so how much effort are you going to put into the dissent?

I will tell you, having worked with her on opinions, she put a lot of effort into every single thing that she did. She took great care. And when you read the dissents, particularly I'm thinking of Shelby County in the book, the dissent she wrote from the court's decision effectively to gut portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most, if not the most important pieces of civil rights legislation ever enacted in this country. When you read that dissent, you clearly come away with the impression that she is writing for the ages. She is not backing down.

Yes, she may have lost on that particular day, but that opinion is written for the future to say, please reconsider this. This is so wrong and it is taking us backward. It's not even that we're stalling from advancing with respect to racial relations in this country and particularly voting rights. It's that we're actually going backward. And so when she was writing that opinion, I think you see from reading it very much that she had the mindset that she was writing for the ages and very helpful. She was always an optimist. People who didn't know her don't always know this about her, but she was incredibly optimistic. It's what I think kept her in the trenches and kept her going and fighting through everything. And she said that the dissent's hope is always that eventually the opinion will one day, or the reasoning of the dissent will one

day command a majority of the court. And so ever hopeful, Justice Ginsburg included those dissents, hoping that someone will be inspired by them to reconsider Shelby County and some of the other decisions that were at issue. I'm vague on it, but I think Shelby County and the Citizens United in several cases were ones that have been highly criticized, really being damaging to voters, especially minority voters and stuff. And of course, giving rise to the corporate ownership of the politicians. Is that correct? Yes. So Citizens United is a case in which she has said many times publicly that it was close to the top of her list, if not on the top of her list of cases she'd like to see overturned.

That's a case that lifted a lot of the restrictions on corporate spending in elections. And so it clearly has had the impact of allowing for greater corporate spending and therefore greater corporate influence over elections. Shelby County is enormously significant, particularly today as we see new voting laws coming into effect that are very restrictive in jurisdictions like, for example, Georgia. So Georgia was one of the historically covered jurisdictions under the Voting Rights Act, which is important for Shelby County purposes and current purposes because it means that under the Voting Rights Act as it existed before Shelby County, the state of Georgia could not pass any new voting legislation and have it go into effect without going through what was known as the preclearance process.

Which meant that they had to get approval and sign off from the Justice Department or from a special three-judge federal court. That was hard to get because the Voting Rights Act was intended to attack any voting practices that cause lesser voting rights on account of race. And there are aspects of the new Georgia law that are now being waged after the fact, after it's gone into effect, are now being argued in court, are doing just that. They are diminishing voting rights on account of race. But the point here is, before the Shelby County decision, that Georgia law never could have gone into effect at all. Now, after Shelby County, it goes into effect and challenges can only be brought in the courts after the fact by individual litigants. And so it really does have a dramatic impact

on the ability of legislatures in these covered jurisdictions to enact laws. And those laws are also now being assessed under different provisions of the Voting Rights Act, where the standards might be more generous toward states and localities. So the impact of these decisions collectively is quite substantial. Yeah. And the hobby lobby, I think, restricted women's birth control. Vaguely, I can remember. Yeah. And that was significant because the employers could basically hurt women and women's rights by choosing to fund whatever they wanted. Or not funds. So there is a contraceptive mandate in the ACA that requires employers to provide contraceptive coverage to their employees. And now through several decisions, the Supreme Court over Justice Ginsburg's dissent, including

in the Hobby Lobby case, the court majority has made it a lot easier for employers to opt out of that contraceptive mandate. And Joseph Ginsburg dissented in those cases for many reasons, some of which have to do with the way the ACA was written. Some call it Obamacare. If that's a term that resonates with more people, you can substitute Obamacare for the ACA. But she dissented both because she didn't think that the majority was being fair to what Congress had actually written and intended. But she also more generally cared very passionately about these issues, because in her view, women could never be fully equal if they did not have full control over their reproductive rights and full reproductive

freedom. But that was essential and is essential to women's equality in her view. And so when you read her dissent in Hobby Lobby, which she included in the book, you get the full flavor of why she thought that was so important. And she also, that opinion really highlights something else that was really special about her as a justice. And it is her ability to take these high level questions that the Supreme Court is debating. So for example, in that case, questions about the class, the clash of constitutional rights between employers and employees and religious freedom. And she takes them down to the real world. And she says, for example, in her dissent in that case, let's talk about how expensive contraceptive coverage is for some women.

Let's talk about why this law is so crucially important to women's equality. Because without this mandated coverage, many working women who do not make a lot of money, who come from the background from which she came, she understands this. They may have to spend their entire month's salary just on contraceptive coverage. And the majority, the all-male majority in that case, they just don't understand this. So she had a really special ability in writing her opinions to connect what the court was doing at a very high level with how the law operates on the ground in the real world. And that was a really special aspect of her work as justice. Wow.

Wow. And then the one that she put in the book that was a majority opinion, that United States versus Virginia, I don't know what that was, but do you want to tell us a little bit about that and why she chose that one as one that she did a majority opinion on? Yeah. So we call it the VMI case. It's about the Virginia Military Institute. This was a really important decision, both for the court as a whole

and the evolution of gender equality, but also personally for her. So three years into her time on the Supreme Court, she issues the opinion for the court majority in U.S. versus Virginia. And in so doing, writes for the court the holding that the Virginia Military Institute, which had heretofore excluded women cadets from admission, now has to open its doors to female cadets. This opinion was really special to her for some obvious and some not so obvious reasons.

So as we talk about in the book, one of the reasons it was so special is Justice O'Connor had been assigned the opinion in VMI. And Justice O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, turned and said, no, Justice Ginsburg should write this opinion because she litigated all those gender equality cases. And this is really a capstone to those cases. This is an important crown jewel to all of that work that says not only that laws that discriminate and benefits can no longer stand, but now we have to make sure that all avenues of opportunity are open up to women equally with men. And Justice Ginsburg was so grateful to Justice O'Connor for that gesture. She actually referred to her in conversation with me as

akin to a big sister looking out for her. And she was very grateful for that. The second reason VMI was so special and important is perhaps more obvious to a lot of people. And that is that as a justice, she was able to cite the precedents of all those hard won victories she had secured in the gender equality sphere in the 1970s. So the VMI majority opinion she wrote is riddled with citations to Reed versus Reed, Frontier, Weisenfeld, all these cases she had litigated

before the court in the 70s. And that's really special. But a final reason why that case was so special to her that a lot of people don't know is that it was in many respects the replay of a case she had lost in the 1970s before the court. There was a case called Vortimer. And that case came out of Philadelphia. And it was a challenge to disparate opportunities at a boys' high school and a girls' high school in Philadelphia. And the high schools were for high-achieving students. And the high schools were totally uneven. The opportunities, the classes, the facilities were far inferior at the girls' high school. So a girl sued and said, I want to go to the boys' high school. And a trial, federal trial court agreed with her and said,

yes, this is unfair. It violates the Equal Protection Clause under this now evolving notion of equality that the Supreme Court is starting to recognize. The appellate court reversed and said, no, the case goes to the Supreme Court and Justice Ginsburg and the ACLU are brought in to help with the case. And she writes the opening brief, but then local counsel who has a different theory of the case effectively fires her, the original lawyer on the case, fires her and the ACLU, writes the reply brief, argues the case herself, the court winds up splitting four to four. And what happens when the Supreme Court ties is no precedent is created, no decision is announced, but the holding of the lower court is affirmed. So in this case, the appellate court, which had upheld the

separate high schools, its decision was affirmed. Fast forward 20 years later, now Justice Ginsburg still angry about the loss in Borchheimer, but someone who just put her nose down and kept doing the work. Now she gets to write for the Supreme Court to effectively overrule that case and say, no, the state must provide equal opportunity to boys and girls, men and women alike. And so that really made that case very special. And it was, I was not the least bit surprised that she wanted to include that in the book. That's awesome. That is a, what a great story. That is so awesome. So I see why she wanted that in the book. That's great. Then you guys picked three different recent speeches, I think here. Is it three or four? We have one at the beginning as well. And then why did she pick these four

with you? Part of it was that they hadn't been published before. So we really wanted to be careful about not replicating my own words and not duplicating aspects of that book. That's why I say the books are very complimentary of one another. But the other thing is these were more recent. They were speeches that she had given in 2018, 2019, where our health is failing. And you know that she's, I'm not disclosing anything she told me, common sense dictates she would be thinking as she's 85, 86, 87, she's starting to think about that retirement is coming. And so you get through these speeches, a really special window into someone who's reflecting back on a life very well lived and talking about how she came to value certain things, what drove her, among other things, her Jewish faith and the calling

to serve justice that really meant to her. Talking, as I said earlier, about her family and her story as an immigrant, which was a very important part of how she thought about herself, how she defined herself, her belief. One of the speeches, the final installment in the book, Before the Afterword, that I wrote after after she passed is just a magnificent speech that she gives to new Americans who are taking the oath of citizenship. And she talks to them about how, OK, now you're one of us. This is your country, too. This is your constitution. Constitution. And as she liked to say, over the whole course of her career, it's all of our Constitution, or the Constitution belongs to all of us. And it's up to all of us to fight for a

Constitution that we want. It's not okay to just sit back and assume that judges will do that for you. It's up to all of us. And you hear her saying this to the newest citizens of the country, that it's now up to you to join in this work. And I can't think of a better way to end the book than to hear her call to them, but really to all of us to fight for the country that we want and the constitutional values that we cherish. Yeah. What a beautiful last message, last word, last words from her that are coming out. You work with her not only as a law clerk, but on the book and stuff. What was it like to work with her? Did her public persona that we perceived of her match who she really was? And your thoughts on that. She was so careful and so exacting and such a hard worker. It would be

hard to overstate those things. Her standards were exceedingly high. She never asked more of you than you could do, but she definitely pushed you. And I'm particularly thinking about my time as her law clerk. And I think most of her law clerks would say this, that she had the highest of expectations, but she never asked more of us than we could do. She just understood that we had maybe untapped talent that we hadn't really worked with. And then that if she nudged us a little bit, we would get there. And she also never asked more of us than she asked of herself. She had the highest standards for herself and she worked so hard. I'm not sure I've ever known anybody who was a harder worker. Again, I think that was all because of her devotion

to her country and to public service. But if you talk to people who knew her going all the way back, and I recently talked to someone who went to law school with her, he talked about how incredibly hardworking, incredibly smart she was, and incredibly careful she was. So I do think these are defining features of her life and that they go a long way to explain why she was so successful when particularly early on, so many roadblocks were thrown in her way for being a woman, for being a mother, for being Jewish. It was very hard to find a job as people know for her. And yet she just kept moving forward. What's so interesting to me about working with her again on the book,

and again, I can't emphasize enough how special it was and what a great experience it was, but I'm a little embarrassed to admit when I turned in pages to her, like for example, of the draft introduction that I had written, they came back completely covered in ink and edits, no differently than the draft opinions I turned in 20 years ago. Part of me was very humble enough to admit, okay, I still have a lot of work to do, but gosh, I thought I'd made a little bit of progress in 20 years. Well, it speaks to how meticulous she was and how much she cares. That's right. And I think it's really important for people to know that I'm talking about pages

she sent back to me in August, a month before she died. She was still so meticulous and so careful and so dedicated. And this was a book, this wasn't a Supreme Court opinion, but everything had to be just right. And she was still putting all of that energy into her work on the court right up until the very end. And another thing that really struck me about the two experiences is that I clicked for her the year she had her first bout with cancer. And I can tell a lot of really great stories about that really inspiring stories about how amazing she was, but how it connects here is that she spent a lot of time in the hospital during that early, the early months of that year. And every day, if we hadn't delivered a big packet of work for her, she would call Chambers and she would say,

where's my work? She wanted to work. And fast forward 20 years later, some of the time I'm sending her pages, she was in the hospital. And I said, oh, justice, I'll just wait till you get home. And she'd say, no, I want to work. And so this is someone who just, she just kept working and propelling herself forward. And she was, she was almost superhuman. And so even when you asked, did I know when we were working on the book, I think in my head, I did know that the end was coming, but because of all I had seen in those decades, I just couldn't fathom her passing on because she really did seem invincible to me. And so even knowing all that I knew when I learned I was in shock for a while, I just couldn't believe it. Yeah. A lot of us celebrated when she'd beat something or get out of the hospital. We, the Victoria, like social media would light up and everybody would be like, yay.

She's once again rebounded and all that good stuff. You're right. It is a special book. It is a special message that you both wrote together and sending her final message forth. And you're the emissary who gets to carry this message forward now. In any last conversations that you had that were about the book and sending off the book, was there any comments or last conversations that you want to recount that just would have been basically your final send off about her thoughts in the book, et cetera, et cetera?

There are a couple of things that come to mind. The first is it was really important to her that when talking about our book, I also talk about her in this book. And so I'm really glad that you asked me about the origins of our book. And I got to talk about that because again, this is a reflection of who she was. She was someone who lifted up the voices of others, particularly other women. And she, and I certainly saw that in my life and my relationship with her. And she was also someone who really wanted to honor the people who had come before her. And you see this repeatedly. When she testified before the Senate at her confirmation proceedings, she said, yes, I

did all this important work in the 1970s, but I was building on the work of others. She lists a lot of people, including Harriet Tubman. She goes very far back. And so it was very important to her to honor the women who paved the way for her. And so all of that is a window into why I think it was so important to her that in talking about our book, I also talk about her in this book. The other thing I will say is in our final oral conversation, we did email many times after this phone call, but I remember very vividly our last phone call.

And I write about this in the afterword to the book. Among other things that we talked about, we talked about my kids. She asked about my children and she asked about how they were being affected by the pandemic, by COVID-19. And particularly, she wanted to know if they were going back to school in person or online. And then she went on to ask about, or to say, I should say, that she was really concerned about all the children in our country and around the world who were being so profoundly affected by the pandemic. And that's a window into, I say in the book, two things,

but I want to add a third. It's a window first and foremost into how important her family was to her. And that she always, when you talk to her as her law clerk, her former law clerk and other law clerks will tell you that she always asked about our families. And that was a really special thing because I've just described to somebody who worked really hard and whose professional life was so important to her, but her family always came first. And that was a value that she passed down to us.

What I say in the book also about this conversation that I think is really important and a really special window in who she was, particularly at the end of her life, but throughout her life, is that in asking about my kids and talking about all the kids affected by COVID-19, she was thinking about others and she was focused on the future. She was thinking about the future, the next generation. And she cared so much about others and she cared so passionately about the future. And one of the reasons, one of the primary reasons we compiled the book and we really threw ourselves into it

was because, as I've said, we wanted to inspire people to keep fighting for the things that were so important to her. And that includes the next generation. So I hope that future generations will pick up the book and they will learn about Justice Ginsburg and they will read her opinions and they will be inspired to keep waging these fights. There you go.

Thank you for sharing that too. I think it's a special book. It's an important book. And yeah, I think what she wanted to send off and what you talked about is really important as well. And just like you say, hopefully a lot of future generations read this and maybe we'll get some of these dissenting cases turned over. That's the hope. That's the hope. That's the hope. There you go. And it sounds like a lot of what she sent forth was hope.

My last question to you will be, she became this viral fame person. I remember watching her, I think it was with Stephen Colbert, showing him his workout and he was trying to keep up with her. And I was sitting there eating my Cheetos and drinking my Coke going, holy crap, she's working out more than I am. She's a better shape than I am. And she became more loved as a public figure. There was the Notorious RBG that came out and that turned into a whole viral meme. If you want to touch maybe a little bit on that and how she felt about that and the experience she had going, whoa. I watched that Colbert episode as well, and I'm not sure he was keeping up with it.

I don't think he was. I don't think he was. She was amazing. When I clerked for her, she was doing one-arm pushups. I was a division one college athlete. I've never, she was doing one-arm pushups. I was a division one college athlete. I've never been able to do one-arm pushups. She was just incredible, absolutely a force and so committed to her health. And that's, and I think so dedicated. And that's why she was able to fight for as long as she did. Of course, I so wish that she had been able to fight longer, but gosh, she left it. To borrow a sports analogy, she left it all on the field.

She really did. In terms of the pop culture status, for those of us who clerked for her before that time, we call ourselves the pre-notorious clerk. We were gobsmacked. We couldn't believe this because she's just quiet. She's somewhat reserved to see her morph into this, the notorious RBG and walk by people with t-shirts with her with a crown on. It was like, what? What is going on? And I think for her initially, I did an event.

She came to UC Berkeley, actually. We did a couple of events together shortly after this all exploded. And I watched her and took this all in, I think she was confused. And then she was amused. She thought, Oh, gosh, this is fun. And what I think came to be the case is that she realized that all of this was leading to people engaging with her ideas and engaging with her principles and, again, the things for which she was fighting. And to her, so long as it was about that and about people being fired up, for example, to try and see Shelby County overturned, that was the big triggering dissent of all of this. And people being fired up to speak out when they see injustice and to care about fighting the many fights we still need to wage for racial justice, for gender equality, for other things. As long as it was about that, then I think she fully embraced it. I don't think she cared to have herself as the center of attention. I think it was about the ideas and the fact that in particular, she saw this trickling

down to young kids and young girls in particular. I think that was really inspiring to her and she really liked that. So for example, she had a picture on her desk of her in her robe, standing with a little girl who's dressed up in a robe. And I think she loved that this little girl had this 80 something year old woman to look up to how many, by the way, 80 something women are role models or superheroes, shall we say in our community, in our, in our world. And I think she loved that this little girl could look up to an 80 something year old woman and say, I want to be just like her. She's my

role model. And so there were a lot of moving parts to it. But at the end of the day, I don't think it was about her being the center of attention. It was about the idea that we could have a woman in her 80s be a superhero to kids and a superhero for all the right reasons for fighting injustice, for fighting for equality, for speaking her mind, for working hard and being successful and being, having authority in government. This, these are all the sorts of things that she loved and that she loved seeing celebrated again, though it wasn't so much about her. It was about those larger things. That's, that's really beautiful. I think it was

either that picture. I'm pretty sure I've seen pictures of little young girls walking through protests and stuff like that, dressed up as her. And I was like, that's magical. That's going to make an impact 20, 40, 60 years. The legacy of that is just amazing. As we go out, any last things that you want to touch on maybe that we didn't cover in the book? Actually, just on that note, I will say that when she passed away, I had the tough job of trying to get this to the finish line. We had turned in the manuscript three weeks before she passed. But then of course, on the back end of any book, there's a lot of work to do. And I wrote the afterword shortly after she passed, but I also made the decision, and I hope she's not mad at me, to add a few images. We had agreed on the images. And to your point, one of the images

that I added that I know she would have loved was an image of a little girl who came to pay respects when the justice was lying in repose on the steps of the Supreme Court. And the little girl is dressed in a Supergirl costume, and she has a cape, and she's holding a rose, and she's saluting the justice. And I just love that picture. And I know she would have because it's everything that she cared about. It's a little girl who's inspired, who knows about the legacy of the justice, hopefully will keep studying that legacy. So many other little girls and boys will grow up to keep fighting the fights that were so important to Justice Ginsburg. And that is our hope with this book to keep inspiring people to

do just that. There you go. And I hope it will inspire everyone to go out and buy the book, share the book and keep her legacy going, keep her message going, and hopefully continue to fight the good fight. Stand up for people who need help. I'm a big believer in Bobby Kennedy. Bobby Kennedy is one of my big heroes and sending forth ripples of hope and making change and realizing that we all have a voice in doing that. So I hope that the message of hers carries forward and people take that to a whole new level and hopefully create a better society because we certainly need one after the last four or five years. So there you go. Thank you very much, Amanda, for being on the show. I certainly appreciate you coming on and sharing some of your heartfelt stories and everything else and the beauty of this book and her message and what

you guys are sending forth. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. And give us your plugs as we go out, Amanda, where people can look you up on the interwebs and order the book. The book is called Justice Thou Shalt Pursue, A Life's Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union. And it's published by the University of California Press. You can find it on their website, on Amazon, on Walmart, and at a host of small indie bookstores as well and other major chains. So hopefully you can look for it there. And I'm at UC Berkeley School of Law and at Professor Amanda Tyler on Twitter. Thank you very much, Amanda.

Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss. Be sure to share this message out, please. From the bottom of my heart, please go share out the message, share out the book, share out the podcast and everything else. It's been a great show today. Go to goodreads.com for us, Chris Voss, all our different groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and all those different things. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other and we'll see you guys next time.