On Being American -

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Résumé :
In her work as an appellate judge, Justice Ginsburg translated this devotion into a jurisprudence focused on We the People, substantively and procedurally. Substantively, Justice Ginsburg insisted that faithfully employed, the words of the Constitution supported an expansive understanding of who was included in We the People, despite the framers' narrow understanding of the phrase when it appeared in the preamble to the Constitution. Expressed also as a jurisprudence of equality and opportunity, Justice Ginsburg believed that the phrase promised equal dignity for people despite their gender, gender identity, race, or disability. Procedurally, We the People shaped Justice Ginsburg's approach to the process of deciding cases, guiding every step of her judicial process-the way she read the Constitution and statutes, approached voting issues, and analyzed the demands of the separation of powers, for example. While the substantive contours of We the People have received the most attention, the full sweep of her jurisprudence appears also in the process she used in analyzing all issues. Justice Ginsburg's jurisprudence of We the People became the ordering principle of this book, explaining both the book's title and its topics. Instead of a general survey of Justice Ginsburg's work, the book tells the story of an advocate and a jurist committed to increasing in material ways the bundle of rights we all carry around with us as Americans. As Linda Greenhouse explained in the Foreword, the story begins with Justice Ginsburg's commitment to an America that enables people with diverse experiences to live together in civic harmony. Justice Ginsburg believed that because the American experience involved living in community, the religious expression of some of us had to yield when the expression oppressed others of us in ways endangering that harmony--...