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Hello and welcome to Amicus Slates Podcast about the law and the justices who interpret it. I'm Dahlia Lithuic, Slates Supreme Court correspondent.

Now over the summer, an awful lot of you wrote in to ask that we please, please, please profile some of the justices themselves.

Talk about their stories, their biographies, and ways that make them come alive beyond just their opinions and the things that they write and say on the bench.

So this week we thought we'd oblige by interviewing Linda Hirschman, a friend of Slate, and the author of a new book, Sisters in Law,

How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to the Supreme Court and changed the world.

Sisters in Law just came out a few weeks ago, so we invited Linda into the studio to talk about these two pioneering women,

and what the role of gender really is at the Supreme Court. Now this is a subject I've thought and written about so much myself, so it gives me huge pleasure to welcome Linda Hirschman to Amicus.

Thank you so very much for having me.

Now I think that one of the reasons this book is so intriguing, it's a joint biography of O'Connor and Ginsburg, the first two women at the US Supreme Court.

Now there are four women, but this is really I think through the lens of looking at the two of them and their relationship, and obviously it's so tempting to talk about how different they are, right?

We have a Republican cowgirl who grows up in the plains of Arizona, appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981, and then this wonky Brooklyn intellectual, you know, child of Jewish parents, who's appointed by Bill Clinton in 1993.

And yet your contention is they're more like than not.

I argue that they're more like than not because their characters were very similar.

They both came to the belief that they were entitled to govern, which is not a common thing for women in 1930s and 40s to think.

...