Behind the Scenes of "The Class of RBG"
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 15 August 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In July, Slate published "The Class of RBG,” a print piece and two podcast episodes about the nine other women in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Harvard Law School class. June Thomas talked to Dahlia Lithwick and Molly Olmstead about the making of the package on the July 26 episode of Working, Slate’s podcast about the creative process. We thought Amicus listeners would enjoy a slightly extended version of that interview.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm June Thomas, senior managing producer of Slate Podcasts and a co-host of Working, |
| 0:15.9 | a podcast about the creative process. |
| 0:18.5 | I recently recorded a segment on working with Amicus' own, |
| 0:22.7 | Dahlia Lithwick and Slate staff writer Molly Olmsted |
| 0:25.5 | about their big class of RBG project, |
| 0:28.5 | which you heard on Amicus last month. |
| 0:30.8 | And I wanted to share that segment with you today. |
| 0:33.4 | You'll get to hear about how the project was put together over the past year, |
| 0:36.8 | what it was like to interview Justice Ginsburg, and other great behind-the-scenes stories. Here's our conversation. Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate and hosts the podcast Amicus. Hi, Dahlia. Hi, Dune. And Molly Olmsted is a Slate staff writer. Hi, Molly. Hi Dune. Okay, let's start from the beginning. Where did the idea for the class of RBG originate? Dan Cois's wife is the short answer. That's Alia Smith, who's an attorney herself. Where did she come up with it? She watched the movie, the biopic, on the basis of sex. |
| 1:16.2 | There's this famous scene that everybody talks about. Erwin Griswold has all, it's 1956, it's the |
| 1:22.7 | autumn, and all the women in the class of 59 at Harvard, all of them are invited to his home to explain one by one painstakingly why they took a slot from a man at Harvard Law School. |
| 1:39.3 | There were 10 women in the class, including RBG, 500 plus men, and they had to justify it. So I think that |
| 1:47.4 | the genesis was, thank God, a woman watching that said, what happened to those other nine women? |
| 1:54.1 | And we were off. Amazing. So, okay, great idea. How did you move from great idea to what became this huge piece and two-part podcast series? Molly, where did you begin? |
| 2:09.8 | Well, the first step was trying to figure out who these women were, which there was nothing online that had a list of these women. So I had to sneak into |
| 2:22.0 | Georgetown's law library. Here's the felony part of the story. Let's get it out of the way. |
| 2:28.4 | We had an intern at the time. I brought her along because she was an undergraduate student, I believe, |
| 2:37.2 | and so we just kind of were hoping that if we got caught, that I would at least have someone |
| 2:43.2 | to point to, to be like, look, it's all fine. But, yeah, ultimately, I just sort of like walked in |
| 2:50.3 | with confidence and no one really stopped me. |
| 2:53.6 | So we got these yearbooks and I sort of, you know, took some photos, wrote down some names. |
| 3:02.9 | And then the rest is just sort of like standard stuff. |
... |
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