 Hello, my name is Avon Brooker-Rutowski and the story I will be reading today is titled Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the case of RBG versus inequality written by Jonah Winter and illustrated by Stacey Innerst. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, during this trial, you will learn about a little girl who had no clue just how important she would become. You will see the unfair world she was born into where boys were valued more than girls, where women were not encouraged to achieve and aspire. You will see evidence of that unfairness just as she herself has seen it all her life. Here are the facts of her case. Ruth Bader was born on March 15, 1933. The daughter of two Jewish parents whose families had fled Europe for Brooklyn, New York to escape anti-Jewish persecution. Her father owned a fur shop for many years. When the shop went out of business, he got a job at a clothing store. He was uneducated. He had never finished high school. Ruth's mother graduated from high school at the age of 15, smart enough that she might have gone to college. But at this point in history, girls were discouraged from going to college. So Ruth's mother got a job to help pay for her brother's college education. Next came marriage and a husband who discouraged her from working outside the home. Like many men of his time, he thought that a woman's place was in the home. This was what Ruth saw as a girl. What Ruth also saw was a mother who loved books and loved to read and a mother who wanted her daughter to have the good education that she herself had been denied. Ruth saw a mother who saved every penny she could for her daughter to someday go to college. Once a week, Ruth's mother dropped her off at the local library, which was above a Chinese restaurant and left her there while she was getting her hair done. Surrounded by books and the smell of Chinese food, Ruth would choose three books to take home for the week. She liked books about mythology, about different goddesses and gods, and Nancy Drew Mysteries. This all happened in Brooklyn, which has long been home to lots of Jewish families and businesses. Brooklyn has also been home to anti-Jewish violence and vandalism. During the 1930s and 1940s, to be Jewish in America was to know anti-Semitism. We now offer into evidence anti-Semitism experienced first hand by Ruth, a sign outside a resort in Pennsylvania seen from her parents car. It said no dogs or Jews allowed. This happened right here in America. No dogs or Jews allowed. Being smart can be a great defense against such meanness and stupidity, and Ruth was one smart cookie. She tied for highest grades in her elementary school, where she wrote an essay about the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights called Landmarks of Constitutional Freedom. Evidence of an early interest in law, injustice in words. This is not to say she always knew what she wanted to be. In high school, Ruth had many interests and hobbies, editing the school newspaper, playing cello in the orchestra, and even twirling a baton at football games, and once chipping a tooth in the process. The day on which Ruth would graduate from high school, with honors, promised to be a glorious day, she ranked six out of a class of 700, and she had won a New York State Scholarship for College. But Ruth was nowhere to be seen at the ceremony. That's because she stayed home. Ruth's mother had been ill with cancer for four years, and on the very day Ruth was to graduate, her mother died. Instead of wearing a cap and gown and being honored, Ruth was mourning the death of the person she loved most in the world. The person whose dream was to see Ruth go on to college and become an independent woman. There was only one thing for Ruth to do. Suitcase in hand, she arrived at Cornell University, the same university her mother's brother had gone to, the same university her mother might have gone to had she been encouraged. It was 1950 and very few girls went to college. At Cornell, male students outnumbered female students, four to one. For a girl to get into Cornell, she had to be very smart. But she had to pretend not to be smart if she wanted a boy to ask her out on a date. She could not be seen studying. This was a problem for Ruth, who was a very serious student. Her solution was to do her studying in the bathroom, where no boys would see her. That's just how things were. And then along came Martin Ginsburg. Martin was different from any boy she'd ever met. He liked that she had a brain, and Ruth was different from any girl he'd met. She had dreams of having a career, of being independent. She spoke only when she had something interesting to say, and she was always listening, always thinking, always learning. In her constitutional law class, Ruth learned about freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Freedoms all Americans are guaranteed in the Constitution. She learned about a senator named Joseph McCarthy, who is trying to take away these important rights, and brave lawyers who were fighting him in court. Learning about these lawyers made Ruth want to become one. She believed she could be a good lawyer. And support herself. But the decision to become a lawyer was not an easy one for a woman to make in 1954. There were very few female lawyers in America. Ruth's own father discouraged her from going to law school because he believed she wouldn't get a job. Besides, her place was in the home. Ruth refused to listen to her father. She saw no reason why she should not become a lawyer. She was just as smart and capable as any man. Her verdict was final. She would go to law school. But first, she would get married to her first and only love, Martin Ginsburg. And now, girls and boys of the jury, we offer into evidence some of the more outrageous nonsense Ruth endured before, during, and after law school. Exhibit A, it was her first job out of college right before law school. Her boss demoted her and slashed her wages because he saw she was pregnant. This was a common practice. What could Ruth do? Exhibit B, a rival at Harvard Law School, where there were only nine women in a class of 500. Harvard did not even provide a place for the women to live. Not very welcoming. Exhibit C, in the law library, she was barred from entering the periodical room because she was a woman. The guard would not let her in, nor help her in any way. She needed a book from this room. How was she supposed to complete her assignment? Exhibit D, most classes had just one woman per class. For comic relief, the professor in the lecture hall would often call on the lone woman, such as Ruth, as if it were a joke. But the woman almost always answered correctly. She had to. She was representing all women. Exhibit E, one night the law school dean invited all nine female students, including Ruth, to a dinner at his house. He sat each woman next to a male law professor. He then went around the table asking each female student why she thought she deserved a spot in this law school that could have gone to a man. Ruth's answer to better understand the work of my husband. And yet, without Ruth's help, her husband, who was also a student at Harvard Law School, would not have graduated. He became gravely ill and was unable to attend classes. Ruth went to his classes for him and took notes so that he could pass his courses. She also took care of him, took care of their newborn baby Jane, went to her own classes and was an editor at the Harvard Law Review. Wow, she went to her husband's classes, attended her own classes, took care of him while he was sick and took care of their baby, while being the editor of the Harvard Law Review. Wow, Martin recovered, graduated and got a job at a law firm in New York City. So Ruth transferred from Harvard Law School to New York's Columbia Law School and tied for first in class when she graduated. Surely Ruth would get a job, right? But at Columbia's job placement center, most job postings said men only. Exhibit F, even among the law firms supposedly open to hiring women. Not one firm would hire her. She was a woman, she was Jewish and she was a mother. Ruth just shrugged and moved on. First to a job as a law clerk, then as a law professor, only to encounter unfairness again and again. Exhibit G, at Rutgers University she found out that female professors were being paid less than male professors. She and another woman sued the school and won. Exhibit H, Ruth would speak up at faculty meetings and the male professors would totally ignore her. A male professor would then say the very same thing that Ruth had said and get acknowledged for being smart. This kept happening even after Ruth became Columbia's first tenured female law professor. By the 1970s, a lot of women had had enough of this sort of treatment. They took part in protests and demonstrations with signs saying enough is enough. Equal pay for equal jobs, women's liberation and equality. It wasn't Ruth's style to take part in protests, but she did do something. An organization called the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU, asked Ruth to be in charge of court cases involving women's inequality. The reason they asked her, because she was a woman and they thought this was quote women's work, there was no end to this disrespect. Nonetheless, Ruth accepted the position and in 1972, she became the leader of the ACLU Women's Rights Project, a battle in the courts against unfairness to women. She was the lead lawyer for six Supreme Court cases and she won five of them, though Ruth herself was not a revolutionary. What she did for women was revolutionary. She won the right for women to get equal protection of the laws, to be treated as equal to men. Ruth had become a lawyer not to change the world. She'd become a lawyer because she knew she had the verbal and analytical skills to handle the job as well as any man. But here she was, the most important female lawyer in America, fighting and winning legal battles for all American women. Here she was changing the world. That's why in 1980, she was chosen by President Jimmy Carter to be a judge for the most important court of law in America besides the Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals. She was only the second woman in history to serve on this court. Now it was her job to make judgments, to judge what was and wasn't legal. A good judge listens closely, chooses words carefully, and values fairness above all else. This job suited Ruth perfectly. After 13 years of being a judge at the age of 60, Ruth got a phone call one night. It was from President Bill Clinton. He wanted to appoint her to the Supreme Court to be just the second female Supreme Court justice in history. As a girl, Ruth never dreamt she would be a lawyer or a judge, much less a Supreme Court justice. In her acceptance speech, she spoke of her mother, I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve, and daughters are cherished as much as sons. When Ruth arrived on the court, the first female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, was still serving. When Sandra retired, Ruth was the only woman on the Supreme Court for a few years, tiny and outnumbered. And yet, what she brought to the court was enormous dignity, civility, intelligence, and a soft-spoken manner. She also brought some of the most powerful, strongly worded dissents in Supreme Court history. A dissent is when a Supreme Court justice disagrees with the opinion of the majority of the nine judges. In Ruth's case, a dissent often involves a written statement perfectly worded that rips apart the opinion of the majority would often wear a dissent collar. When the nine judges had an important discussion and saw Ruth enter with her dissent collar, the eight judges knew Ruth had a very strong opinion that she was ready to talk out. Physical toughness is another of Ruth's trademarks. In 2009, she found out she had cancer and needed surgery. Only 19 days after her operation, Ruth returned to the court. She did so because she wanted people, especially young women, to see at least one woman on the Supreme Court at any number of points in her life could have given up. She could have listened to her father. She could have dropped out of law school. She could have abandoned her search for a job. She could have accepted being paid less than her male associates. Instead, she stayed on the difficult path she chose for herself, removing one obstacle after the next until she arrived at the very court that is the symbol of justice. In America, there can be just one verdict because she did not give up, because she refused to let other people define her limitations as a person. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has herself become a symbol of justice in America.