April 1, 2022
Stacey Abrams, who battled to protect the voting rights of millions of Georgians. Acting U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates, who refused to approve the Muslim travel ban. Commercial litigator Roberta Kaplan, who sued the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. These are among the women lawyers who challenged the moral vacuity of the Trump administration, chronicled here by Slate's senior legal correspondent.
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June 6, 2022
Slate legal correspondent Lithwick (coauthor, Me v. Everybody) takes an incisive if uneven look at women who responded to Donald Trump’s election by “upending their lives and their careers and their families to organize a new kind of resistance movement.” Theorizing that women have a “special relationship” with the law because it is “the most conventional way with which to effect radical change,” Lithwick profiles, among others, former acting attorney general Sally Yates, who was fired for refusing to defend Trump’s executive order targeting Muslim travelers, and Robbie Kaplan, a “Jewish, gay, brash commercial litigator from New York City” who won a $26 million lawsuit against the organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. Though the profiles are full of sharp observations and astute analyses of legal matters, Lithwick’s focus on individual attorneys and activists inadvertently echoes the “Great Man” theory of social change she thinks Americans are “too apt to succumb to.” Much stronger, if more depressing, are the sections she devotes to her own story of sexual harassment by a federal judge and her sense of complicity in upholding “the culture of silence in the legal profession.” Despite its flaws, this evocative study captures the power and fragility of the rule of law. Agent: Tina Bennett, Bennett Literary.
Starred review from August 15, 2022
The senior legal correspondent for Slate looks at the responses of women lawyers to the Trump era. "Something extraordinary happens when female anger and lawyering meet," writes Lithwick, who begins with oral arguments in the 2016 case Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt before three female justices. She closes, of course, with the June 24, 2022, decision in Dobbs v. Jackson's Women's Health Organization. In the author's telling, that span represents not only the nation's six-year slide into an abyss, but also a time when women lawyers mounted dogged, directed resistance. Between starry-eyed opening and grim conclusion, she profiles women lawyers whose stories provide a contextualizing capsule tour of the era and offer some bracing hope. Readers will reconnect with Sally Yates, the acting attorney general who almost immediately found herself standing up to her new boss when he executed his first travel ban, and learn that the Democrats' success in Georgia in 2020 and 2021 was mostly due to Stacey Abrams' methodical, 10-year plan to mobilize Georgia's Democratic vote. We also meet Nina Perales of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who successfully litigated against adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census; and the ACLU's Brigitte Amiri, who defended the right of a pregnant 17-year-old refugee in U.S. custody to get an abortion--ultimately winning a case in which then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh's preliminary opinion arguably paved his way to the Supreme Court. In this same profile, the author reveals that the same Office of Refugee Resettlement apparatchik who directed his staff to stop keeping track of the children separated from their families at the border also scrupulously maintained his own records of the menstrual cycles of the girls in custody. Though the text is necessarily bristling with names of court cases, Lithwick's writing is friendly to lay readers and marked by her trademark pithy wit and an endearing faith in the promise of the legal system. "Women plus law equals magic," she concludes. Required reading for this post-Dobbs world.
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Starred review from September 1, 2022
When it comes to legal challenges to human rights in general and women's rights in particular, it is sobering to note that threats against them are coming from inside the house. From the lowest rung of the judicial ladder to the Supreme Court, legal decisions that protect fundamental freedoms are under assault in existential ways. Since the mid--twentieth-century, more and more women have been attracted to law as a career, and a stellar cadre of social-justice-focused lawyers has recognized the courts as the linchpin in protecting fragile rights. The battles have been arduous, the defeats aggravating, and the victories often disconcertingly ephemeral. Lawyer and legal journalist Lithwick, a self-described "professional court-watcher," profiles the best-of-the-best women lawyers whose dedication, drive, and determination have led to monumental changes. Some are household names, such as Sally Yates, Stacey Abrams, and Anita Hill. Others are less well-known, although their advocacy is equally pioneering, including Latinx vote strategist Nina Perales and ACLU reproductive rights attorney Brigitte Amiri. Whip-smart and wickedly acerbic, Lithwick shines a reassuring light on the essential interconnectivity between women and the law and champions the vital role women lawyers must continue to play if American democracy is to persevere.
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