With the justice’s permission, a selection of our conversations over the years was published as a book, Conversations With RBG, last November. She and I met in an elevator, bonded over opera, and developed a friendship that was one of the greatest honors of my life. I first met Justice Ginsburg nearly 30 years ago, when I was a young law clerk on the U.S. Helping to explain what was wrong about the “closed-door era” was enormously satisfying. Conditions of life had so changed that audiences responded positively to pleas that society-men, women, and children-would be well served by removing artificial barriers blocking women’s engagement in many fields of human endeavor, from bar membership to bartending, policing, firefighting, piloting planes, even serving on juries. I was alive and a lawyer in the late 1960s, and the decade commencing in 1970. For generations, brave women and enlightened men in diverse nations pursued that goal, but they did so when society was not yet prepared to listen. In that regard I was scarcely an innovator. It was my great good fortune to have the opportunity to participate in the long effort to place equal citizenship stature for women on the basic human-rights agenda.
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