Her arguments in discrimination cases were based squarely on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Gross generalisations about “how women were” or “how men were” had to be forgotten. Her dream was a world in which men and women cared for their children equally and had equal opportunities themselves. And the constitution had to embrace everyone: Lilly Ledbetter, struggling to achieve equal pay; Stephen Wiesenfeld, trying as a widower to get the same benefits as a widow would; Maetta Vance, afraid to tell a racist supervisor to buzz off; the young men of 18 in Oklahoma who just wanted to buy a beer, as girls of 18 could.

What did not change was her regard for her colleagues, conservative or not, in the wonderfully civilised family that was the court. For each of them, after all, their basic motivation was the same. At the end of “Scalia/Ginsburg”, the two famous foes-and-friends sang together the aria which was her favourite: “Separate strands unite in friction/To protect our country’s core... And this is why we will see justice done./We are different;/We are one.”

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