What follows is the first annual Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture delivered by Justice Ginsburg on October 21, 2019, at the University of California, Berkeley. Justice Ginsburg first pays tribute to Herma Hill Kay, her friend of almost fifty years. As Justice Ginsburg says, Kay was her “best and dearest working colleague” during the 1970s. Along with Kenneth Davidson, Justice Ginsburg and Herma Hill Kay wrote the first casebook on gender discrimination, publishing Cases and Materials on Sex-Based Discrimination in 1974. Justice Ginsburg chronicles their friendship as well as Kay’s important role as a trailblazer in the legal academy and as a scholar who documented the lives of the women law professors who paved the way for both of them and all who followed.
Following Justice Ginsburg’s tribute, the authors sat down for a conversation spanning Justice Ginsburg’s life, starting with her childhood through her time on the Supreme Court. Here, Justice Ginsburg tells her story in her own words, discussing how she came to the law, her marriage and family life, her work as an advocate, her time on the bench, and what she has learned from her many battles with cancer. Justice Ginsburg also talks about the work that remains to be done to confront inequality today.