Were we really better off with all men up there?

"The law is a Ass," Sam Weller declared in The Pickwick Papers. And a new book shows how the biggest asses have, historically, sat on the highest court:

For example, the reader gets a bird’s eye view of the petty indignities each of these women endured early in her career. Seared in my memory is the story of how a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then clerking for a district court judge, was in the backseat of her judge’s car while he was giving a ride to a court of appeals judge who worked in the same building, the renowned Learned Hand. Ginsburg asked Hand a question and he answered, as if talking to the windshield from the front passenger seat, “Young lady, I’m not looking at you.” I can still feel the sting, the humiliation she must have felt. 

The reader also gets an inside look at the sexism on the Supreme Court when Ginsburg was arguing her cases and later, when Sandra Day O’Connor arrived. “Women are not fungible with men (thank god!)” wrote Lewis Powell in a note about one of the cases Ginsburg had argued. From William Brennan’s refusal to hire Ginsburg as a clerk because she was female, to Warren Burger’s longstanding practice of assigning O’Connor the Court’s opinion in less important cases, to Harry Blackmun’s imitations of O’Connor’s speaking style and belittling response to Ginsburg’s comments on an opinion that she should have been assigned to write—the boys on the bench made clear that these sisters in law would never truly be one of The Brethren.