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I'm Baroness Hale, about to retire as President of the Supreme Court,

and this is my guest edit of the Today program.

I'm the first woman president of the court and have spent much of my life

campaigning for women to be better represented in the law.

Here's a conversation I had,

my friend and fellow Supreme Court judge, in the United States, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Two trailblazing women, two careers spanning decades, two Supreme Courts. Baroness Hale,

our guest editor today, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have both smashed through the glass ceiling on each side of the Atlantic.

But how has the field changed for women since they first started studying law?

And what are the law itself and the role of lawyers in public life?

They're both trailblazers, but there are both also figures of real controversy.

People who have been accused by some of being too keen to press for change that ought to come

from elected politicians. I've been speaking to them both. Ruth Bader Ginsburg started by describing

what it was like to study at Harvard Law School in the 1950s. Well, in my starting class at Harvard,

there were over 500 students.

Nine of them were women.

In all of the federal judiciary,

there was only one woman at the Court of Appeals level.

Today, in U.S. law schools, women are at least 50% of the students.

And while they're not yet 50% of the judiciary,

they're somewhere in the 30s range and the trend is upward.

...