"It's not that women are better at law than men," Dahlia Lithwick says of the lawyers in her book. "It's that they're really, really good at law." Sally Yates, Becca Heller, Roberta Kaplan, Vanita Gupta, Stacey Abrams, Brigitte Amiri, Pauli Murray: women who, in the years after 2016, treated the law as both the instrument of their exclusion and the only tool worth fighting with.
In this TalksOnLaw interview, recorded in late 2022, Joel Cohen speaks with Dahlia Lithwick, Slate's senior legal correspondent and host of the Amicus podcast, about Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America (Penguin Press, 2022), the Supreme Court she has covered for more than two decades, and what it means to keep faith with the rule of law when the law keeps letting you down.
Women on the Court and in Court
Lithwick contrasts Sandra Day O'Connor's reluctance to be a "woman justice" with Ruth Bader Ginsburg's years as the lone woman, including the strip-search case in which Ginsburg had to explain to her colleagues that a thirteen-year-old girl is not a thirteen-year-old boy. She describes the women judges who stopped the first travel ban, Becca Heller's airport army of volunteer lawyers, and the Charlottesville case, where Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn revived the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 to bankrupt the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in a city where Lithwick had lived for eighteen years.
The Shadow Docket, Dobbs, and the Rule of Law
She explains the "shadow docket," the Court's emergency orders deciding COVID restrictions, the eviction moratorium, Remain in Mexico, and Texas's SB 8 in a few unsigned lines, and why that practice corrodes the lower courts that must apply it. She reads Dobbs as the Court telling women they were not in the room when the Fourteenth Amendment was written, and sets it against the 2022 Kansas referendum and the midterm ballot measures that followed. Asked about cynicism, she cites Vanita Gupta: losing faith in the law is precisely when you must keep it, because "what rushes in is power and violence," and that never redounds to the benefit of women and minorities. She also shares her fear, as of late 2022, that the Supreme Court would decide the 2024 election.
Clerkships, Kozinski, and the Next Generation
In the book's most personal chapter Lithwick describes the clerkship pipeline and the whisper network that warned young women away from Judge Alex Kozinski even though his chambers were the launchpad to a Kennedy clerkship, why the cloistered, hierarchical structure of chambers insulates harassment, and why Kozinski's resignation without an investigation was no ending. She closes with Pauli Murray, the lawyer whose ideas Thurgood Marshall and Ginsburg both borrowed, and the advice she gives law students: in every room, "look for the Pauli Murray."
What to Know Now
The 2024 election was not decided by the Supreme Court, and the Court rejected the "independent state legislature" theory Lithwick feared in Moore v. Harper (June 2023), though it later held in Trump v. United States (2024) that former presidents enjoy broad immunity for official acts. The emergency docket has only grown: by mid-2026 the Court had acted on dozens of emergency applications from the second Trump administration, most of them granted, and Stephen Vladeck's book The Shadow Docket (2023) is now the standard account. Roberta Kaplan went on to win two jury verdicts for E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump ($5 million and $83.3 million, both affirmed by the Second Circuit) and the Charlottesville judgment was reduced on appeal to roughly $9 million. Vanita Gupta left the Justice Department in 2024, Elizabeth Prelogar completed her term as Solicitor General in January 2025, and Becca Heller continues to lead the International Refugee Assistance Project. Women now make up 47 percent of Supreme Court law clerks, about 41 percent of all lawyers, and 26.5 percent of equity partners at large firms. Public confidence in the Court stood at 33 percent in Gallup's July 2026 survey, near its historic low. Proposals to create a formal mechanism for reporting judicial misconduct by clerks, including the Judiciary Accountability Act, remain pending in Congress.
