After the sudden shock of Donald Trump’s victory over Hilary Clinton in 2016, many Americans felt lost and uncertain. It was clear he and his administration were going to pursue a series of retrograde, devastating policies. What could be done?
Immediately, women lawyers all around the country, independently of each other, sprang into action. They weren’t going to stand by in the face of injustice while Trump, Mitch McConnell, and the Republican Party did everything in their power to remake the judiciary in their own conservative imagine. Over the next four years, the women worked tirelessly to hold the line against the most chaotic and malign presidency in living memory. There was Sally Yates, the acting attorney general of the United States, who refused to sign off on the Muslim travel ban. And Becca Hellerm the founder of a refugee assistance program, who brought the fight over the travel ban to the airports. Roberta Kaplan, the famed commercial litigator, who sued the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. And, of course, Stacey Abrams, whose efforts to protect the voting rights of millions of Georgians may well have been what won the Senate for the Democrats in 2020.
These are just a handful of the stories dramatised in Lady Justice, a brand-new and deeply inspiring account of the Trump years from Dahlia Lithwick, one of the nation’s foremost legal commentators. With unparalleled access to her subjects, she has written a luminous book, not about the villains of the Trump years but about the heroes. And as the country reckons with the aftermath of that administration, including a Supreme Court majority assembled and poised to overturn Row v. Wade, Lithwick exposes not only the major consequences of such a decision, but issues a clarion call to join the fight.
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