Opinion

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was all I wanted to be

Nancy Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School and visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, is a retired U.S. District Court judge. She is the editor of “Representative and Dissenting Opinions of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” to be published in December.

I was in my late 20s, attending a conference for women lawyers in the 1970s. I sat in the front row of a large auditorium for the keynote address. The speaker was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project. I was mesmerized.