On Account of Sex tells the story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the 1970s: the brilliant advocate who would become a “notorious” Supreme Court justice and liberal icon (166). Arguing that Ginsburg made her most significant contributions before ascending to the nation's highest court, Philippa Strum analyzes Ginsburg's engagement with the set of cases that grounded a novel feminist jurisprudence. Strum writes that Ginsburg, in advancing her agenda for legal equality between the sexes, was a “prophet” who both envisioned a better world and worked to make it real (2).

Across eight chronological chapters, Strum stitches a rich narrative rooted in Ginsburg's life and advocacy. Strum outlines the explicit sexism infused in American law and introduces colorful plaintiffs and their practical problems. To aid them, Ginsburg drew from the example of Thurgood Marshall's civil rights litigation by “leading the justices, case by case, to a recognition of the unconstitutional harm gender discrimination did to women” (40). By the early 1970s, Ginsburg was teaching at Columbia Law School and steering the ACLU Women's Rights Project, shepherding selected cases to the Supreme Court while also “trying to make certain that the wrong ones . . . were not brought” (58). The text is studded with passages of dialo