I'm Jonathan K. Parton, welcome to K-PART.

A new session of the Supreme Court is upon us.

There's a new justice, and since the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade, questions

about the legitimacy of the high court.

Who better to talk to about all of this than legal affairs correspondent for National Public

Radio, the legendary Nina Totenburg?

But we also talk about her new book, Dinners with Ruth, as in the late Supreme Court Justice

Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In this conversation, first recorded for Washington Post Live on September 29, Tottenburg

talks about their friendship that began decades ago, including why the liberal standard

bearer didn't retire while Democratic President Barack Obama was in the White House.

Well, this would have given her something that, no, not even a great Supreme Court Justice

has.

In 2020 hindsight, she hoped very much to have the first woman president name her successor.

And of course, she, to some extent, that was a gamble, and she lost.

We're going to dive into the book at the same time as we dive into the big issue, and

that's abortion and the Roe decision.

Because you write in Dinners with Ruth that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was

wary, if not critical, of Roe's argument, rather than simply a matter of personal privacy,

you write that Justice Ginsburg viewed abortion as a matter of freedom, which is rooted

in the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.

Explain her thinking on this a little further.

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