Welcome to a special episode of Talking Feds Now, a roundtable in partnership with the LA Times studios.

I'm Harry Littman. In this episode we'll be talking with some very prominent sisters-in-law, all of them who served as clerks with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Today is the kind of day when you wake up and your first thought is, did I have a terrible dream or did that really happen?

Well, it really happened. A day many on the left have been dreading and probably many in the president's flailing campaign had secretly hoped for.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Icon, Professor, Country Changing Advocate, Luminary for 40 years on the DC Circuit in the Supreme Court, and Improbable Hipster Hero, died yesterday from pancreatic cancer.

The news played immediately as a political hurricane with possible game-changing impact on the presidential election.

But we're not here today to engage in any of the political chattering. Our goal is rather to focus on the Trailblazer, Counselor, Visionary, Friend, Spouse, and Mother that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in an 87-year life that saw huge changes in the world, several of which she herself helped propel.

And to do that, we have three of the people who had the good fortune to serve as her clerks, and probably during their years to spend more time with her and chambers than anyone else save her family.

They are Ginger Anders, a clerk in 2004, 2005, and now a partner in the Washington, DC office of Munger Tolls and Olsen, Ginger's a former assistant to the US Solicitor General, and a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel.

And she has argued 18 cases before the US Supreme Court. Ginger, thanks for being here.

Thank you.

Jillian Metzger, clerk in 1997 and 98, and now the Harlan Fisk Stone Professor of Constitutional Law at the Columbia Law School.

Jillian is a co-editor of Galhorn and Bises Administrative Law, a Seminole Administrative Law Casebook, and the Health Care Case, the Supreme Court's decision and its implications.

Jillian, welcome.

Thank you.

And finally, Amanda Tyler, a Ginsburg clerk in 1999, 2000, and now the Shannon Cecil, Turner Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.

She's the author of Habiest Corpus in War Time, from the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay, and a co-editor of Harden Wexler's, the Federal Courts and the Federal System.

The book that is as close as anything to a Bible for Supreme Court practice. Amanda, thanks so much for joining Talking Feds.

Thanks for having me.

All right, so, you know, very hard I know to try to capture a person in 40 minutes or so, but let's try to do our best.

I wanted to start with something that I think you all know very well, but the public not so much, and that was just a Ginsburg's personal manner.

In my few meetings with her, she came across as extremely different, soft spoken, maybe shy, maybe painfully shy.

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