Hello, amicus listener. This is Dahlia Lithwick, and my book, Lady Justice, Women, The Law, and the Battle to Save America, was published this past week by Penguin Press.

Four years in the making. And I wanted to let you know that Lady Justice is available as an audiobook, which I thought might be up your

alley, seeing as you know you listen and it's what you're now doing. I also wanted to let you

know that amicus listeners can snag a sweet, sweet 25% discount on the audiobook when they

buy it from us here at Slate.

Go to slate.com slash justice and enter promo code amicus.

That's promo code amicus at slate.com slash justice.

And so now I'm going to play you a preview from the introduction of the audio book, courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio, read by me, Dahlia Luthwaite.

I sometimes think of the Supreme Court oral arguments in Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstedt on March 2, 2016, as the last truly great day for women and the legal system in America.

There are, to be sure, many such glorious moments to choose from, both before and after Trump, but as a professional court watcher, I had a front row seat to this story,

one that offered a sense that women in the United States

had achieved some milestone that would never be reversed.

The landmark abortion challenge represented the first time in American history

that a historic abortion case was

being heard by a Supreme Court with three female justices. Twenty-four years earlier,

when the next momentous abortion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey had come before the Supreme

Court, only one woman, Sandra Day O'Connor, sat on the bench.

Go back a bit further, and Roe v. Wade, the path-breaking 1973 case that created a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy,

was argued before and decided by nine men and zero women. And when Griswold v. Connecticut,

the lawsuit protecting the rights of married couples to buy and use birth control was argued

at the High Court back in 1965, that bench comprised nine males so uneasy with the topic of contraception that at oral arguments,

nobody was brave enough even to name the birth control device being litigated.

...