RUTH: JUSTICE GINSBERG IN HER OWN WORDS

US, 2019, 89 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Freida Lee Mock.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg was a significant legal presence in the United States during the second half of the 20th century and into the second decade of the 21st-century. She died in 2020, not long before the US presidential election – motivating President Trump and the Republicans to fill her place on the Supreme Court with a Conservative presence prior to the election.

There was much controversy in Justice Ginsberg’s life, early selection for legal studies at Harvard among so many male candidates. The film gives indication of her early life and career but the concentration of the film is on a variety of speeches, findings in the court, interviews, press conferences, later speaking to particular groups. Small, she is nevertheless a strong presence, poised in her younger years, bent over and seemingly minute but always genial in her old age.

The film indicates her liberal stances during her career and her dissenting on the Supreme Court. There is also the famous friendship with the conservative Justice Scalia. And, the film gives some emphasis, to her 56 year marriage to Marty Ginsberg.

In the light of the 2020 elections, it is interesting see that the President of the Senate committee reviewing her appointment to the Supreme Court was Senator Joe Biden.

This film being in connection with the documentary of 2017, R BG, which is much more detail to her life and career.

In 2018 there was the feature film, On the Basis of Sex (although Justice Ginsberg worked on the vocabulary of gender rather than sex), starring Felicity Jones Armie Hammer as Ruth and Marty Ginsberg.