In The New York Times, Professor Julie Suk reviews Lady Justice, a new book by Dahlia Lithwick, that examines the women who stood up to the Trump administration.
In 1873, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that women had no constitutional right to practice law. Indeed, as Dahlia Lithwick notes in this stirring book, a justice explained that the “natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.” But, in reaction, women mobilized to change the laws — and, ultimately, to become lawyers themselves.
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The narrative’s confidence in those values wavers somewhat in the chapters about the women, including Lithwick herself, who accused the legal profession’s most powerful men of abusive sexual behavior. In 2017, a woman who had formerly clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit — known for his spectacular opinions and for sending his clerks on to Supreme Court clerkships — alleged that her boss had shown her pornographic images in his chambers and asked if they turned her on. Another woman who had clerked in the same building reported that Judge Kozinski, in response to her comment that she liked exercising when nobody else was around, had suggested that she work out in the courthouse gym naked.