The wonderful and deservedly Notorious Ruth Bader Ginsberg gives us the best possible new meaning to Superman's credo "Truth, Justice and the American Way". This physically tiny 84 year old women is a superhero of monumental proportion. The new documentary RBG by directors Julie Cohen and Betsy West is a fitting tribute to a unique life well lived. 

Just after graduating from Cornell, Ruth Bader married Martin Ginsberg in 1954. Their daughter Jane was born in 1955. 

There are astonishing details of her intellectual prowess and tenacity; while one of 9 women in her Harvard Law School class of 500. Her husband, Marty, (who was ahead of her a Harvard) was  diagnosed with testicular cancer. As he went through radiation therapy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended class and took notes for both of them, typed her husband's dictated papers, while taking care of their daughter as well as her sick husband—She still made the Harvard Law Review. 

After Marty recovered the Ginsbergs moved to New York, where he began his career as a tax attorney with Weil, Gotshal & Manges. In 2015 Jeffrey Toobin wrote in the New Yorker" Ruth took her third year of law school at Columbia. "Completing her law degree at Columbia graduating (it is variously reported) either tied for first or second in her class. "Harvard’s dean at the time refused to grant her a degree, even though she had done more of her coursework there, so she is a graduate of Columbia Law School. Several subsequent deans of Harvard Law School (including Kagan, now Ginsburg’s colleague) offered to rectify this mistake. “Marty always told me to say no,” Ginsburg said to me, “and hold out for an honorary degree from the university.” That came through in 2011, when one of the other recipients was Plácido Domingo. Ginsburg’s love of opera is nearly as great as her love of the law. At the ceremony, Domingo broke out in a semi-spontaneous serenade of the Justice. A photograph of the scene sits on the mantelpiece in Ginsburg’s chambers. “It was one of the greatest moments of my life".

Toobin's article continues:

"Although Ginsburg graduated at the top of her class, in 1959, she did not receive a single job offer. (Neither did Sandra Day O’Connor when she graduated from Stanford Law, seven years earlier.) Ginsburg scrounged for work."

There is so much more to her story. Her assent and accomplishments go on and on.

What is most clearly on view now is that in her 80s, as physically diminutive as she is she is still the astonishing, brilliant, strong, women who took her mother-in-law's advice, which she has often repeated. “In every good marriage, it pays sometimes to be a little deaf.” Sometimes adding: “It works on the Supreme Court, too.”

GO SEE RBG