Amanda L. Tyler is the Shannon Cecil Turner Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Professor Tyler’s research and teaching interests include the Supreme Court, federal courts, constitutional law, legal history, civil procedure, and statutory interpretation. She is the co-author, with the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union, which the University of California Press published in early 2021. The book is an outgrowth of Justice Ginsburg’s 2019 visit to Berkeley Law when she and Tyler sat down for a conversation about Justice Ginsburg’s life.  The National Women's History Museum was thrilled to have Tyler join us for an inspiring conversation honoring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg one year after her death during our Sundays@Home One Year Later: Honoring the Life and Legacy of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Tyler is also the author of Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay, published in 2017 by Oxford University Press and released in paperback in 2019, as well as Habeas Corpus: A Very Short Introduction, published in 2021 by Oxford University Press.  Tyler has contributed to many books and published with the Atlantic, the Lawfare Blog, other media outlets, and numerous law journals.  Recent articles include "Courts and the Executive in Wartime: A Comparative Study of the American and British Approaches to the Internment of Citizens During World War II and Their Lessons for Today," 107 California Law Review 789 (2019); "Habeas Corpus in Wartime and Larger Lessons for Constitutional Law," Harvard Law Review Online (April 2019); and "A 'Second Magna Carta': The English Habeas Corpus Act and the Statutory Origins of the Habeas Privilege," 91 Notre Dame Law Review 1946 (2016). Since 2016, Professor Tyler also has served as a co-editor of Hart and Wechsler’s The Federal Courts and the Federal System (Foundation Press) (with Richard H. Fallon, Jr., Jack L. Goldsmith, John F. Manning, and David L. Shapiro). 

Prior to joining the Berkeley Law faculty in 2012, Professor Tyler served on the faculty of the George Washington University Law School and was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, New York University School of Law, and the University of Virginia School of Law. In 2017, she was a visiting senior fellow in the Law Department of the London School of Economics and the Order of the Coif Distinguished Visitor. Tyler is a past chair of the Federal Courts Section of the American Association of Law Schools and is an elected member of the American Law Institute. In 2020, Tyler received the law school’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction.

Tyler holds a degree in public policy, with honors and distinction, from Stanford University, and a J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School. At Stanford, she played on the Division I Women’s Soccer Team. At Harvard, she served as treasurer of the Harvard Law Review and won the George Leisure Award for Best Oralist in the James Barr Ames Moot Court Finals. Prior to entering academia,  Tyler served as a law clerk to the Honorable Guido Calabresi at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court of the United States. She also practiced as an associate with the law firm of Sidley & Austin in Washington, D.C. Professor Tyler has run 18 marathons, including 11 Boston Marathons.
 

Why do you believe it’s important to preserve the stories of the women who came before us?

It is so important to preserve the stories of the women who paved the way for the rest of us to dream big and enjoy the rights and opportunities that we have.  We must honor their sacrifices, appreciate that all we enjoy today did not come easy, and be inspired by their example to pay it forward ourselves to continue the work to allow women to flourish and achieve, as RBG would say, “their full human potential.” 

Having Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a mentor was surely an extraordinary honor and experience. As you began your incredible journey with her as a law clerk, was there a moment when you realized she was shifting the trajectory of your life?

There was not a specific moment but instead a series of moments. When I first met her to interview to be her law clerk, I could not have been more nervous. I mean, I really wanted to get the job! I had studied her incredible career as an advocate and read her early Supreme Court opinions. She was already larger than life to me and a personal hero. When I met her, though, she immediately put me at ease and was very friendly. She also had studied my application very carefully. So I learned early on about her kindness and that she took a genuine interest in her law clerks. Every single interaction with her over the 20+ years since underscored these lessons. Her kindness was boundless and she felt a personal stake in both happiness and career successes of all of her law clerks. So, as I said, it was not one particular moment, but countless times when she recommended me for a job, gave great advice, or taught me how to be a better version of myself—all of these together changed the course of my life for the better.  The best way I can put it is to say that she was something of a North Star in my life.

What was it like to collaborate with Justice Ginsburg on "Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union?"

It was amazing.  Here I was, 20 years after serving as her law clerk, working closely with my boss again. There were so many parallels—some poignant, others humorous. When I clerked for Justice Ginsburg in 1999, she had her very first bout with cancer. And when she was in the hospital, she would call chambers every day and ask for us to send her a packet of work. RBG was the hardest working person I have ever known, and her dedication to her job and being a public servant was nothing short of inspiring. So, we sent her packets of work and they would come back right away with a request for more work. Fast forward 20 years and once again she was facing immense medical challenges as we collaborated on the book. Once again, she would ask me to send pages when she was in the hospital, which I did, and once again, she turned them around very fast. The pages that came back this past year were just as marked up as the draft opinions I gave her 20 years earlier. I guess I still have a long way to go in polishing my writing skills. And here’s the funniest/most embarrassing part of all of it: she even marked up my cover notes to her, editing and correcting errors! She was as careful and as hard-working as ever, right up until the end. But the thing that most resonates with me about the whole experience of working on the book with her is what a privilege it was to get to talk with her about her life and career during a period when she was reflecting on them. She had never been much for telling war stories when I was her law clerk, but finally I got to hear some, and they were amazing. And we had some deeply personal conversations as well, which I carry close to my heart. She was—and remains—incredibly inspiring. I think that if I could convey anything to those who did not know her, it would be that she was just as inspiring close-up as she was from far away.

In telling the story of Justice Ginsburg’s remarkable life in her own words through a conversation, what do you hope resonates most with readers of "Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue?"

Our goal in compiling the book was to give readers the chance to hear her tell her life story in her own words and also offer a window into the key aspects of her work both as an advocate and judge to make ours a “More Perfect Union,” as the Constitution’s preamble calls on all of us to do. So in addition to our conversation about her life, we included materials from her favorite gender discrimination cases that she litigated in the 1970s, her favorite opinions from her time on the Supreme Court, and her final speeches in which she talks about her personal heroes, others whose work inspired her, and her own family’s story of immigration along with her great love of her country. When we were discussing a dedication, we decided to dedicate the book to our families and also to all those who work to make ours a “More Perfect Union.”  I think the latter dedication, combined with her inclusion of so many dissents in the book, was her way of passing the torch, knowing as we were compiling the book that her life was coming to an end. She was ever hopeful—indeed, she talked about “the dissenter’s hope” that their view of a case would someday become the law of the land. And I think she has left us in the book a charge to carry on the work fighting for gender and racial equality, for voting rights, and for reproductive freedom for women. All of these things, as she explains in the various components of the book, are crucial to ours being a “More Perfect Union,” and our hope was that readers would be inspired by her example and her words to carry on this enormously important work. 

Words have the power to inspire, motivate, and empower us to live a life with purpose. Justice Ginsburg is powerful example of someone who turned her words into wisdom. Is there a quote from Justice Ginsburg you find particularly galvanizing?

The quote that inspires me the most from Justice Ginsburg is not one of the many that circulate publicly, but instead one that is from our personal correspondence. A few months after I had my first child, I wrote her a letter conveying how nervous I was about going back to work now that I was a mother. She wrote back a response that was as elegant as it was simple. She said, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”  I think this quote is classic RBG. She was so matter-of-fact about things, and in a good way. I think of all the obstacles she faced to launch her career—for example, the early jobs that she could not get because she was a woman, a mother, and a Jew—and did any of this phase her? Not at all. She just keep moving forward. She was bound and determined to make a contribution—to leave this place better than she found it. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Her will was truly exceptional—I dare say, historic—and she found a way to use her talents to achieve her full potential. And we are all the beneficiaries. 

As a longtime and formidable advocate for women’s rights and gender equality, what message would Justice Ginsburg want visitors of a women’s history museum to walk away with?

Justice Ginsburg cared deeply about preserving the stories of the women who came before. In 1971, she included pioneering women’s rights attorneys Dorothy Kenyon and Pauli Murray on the first brief she filed in the Supreme Court in Reed v. Reed, even though they had not formally worked on the case. Later, in her remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation proceedings, she recognized the work of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Tubman, observing, “I stand on the shoulders of those brave people.” In the last year of her life, she asked me to ensure that the work of her dear friend, my late colleague at Berkeley Law Herma Hill Kay (with whom RBG wrote the first casebook on gender discrimination and the law in the 1970s), was finally published. Herma’s book, Paving the Way, chronicles the stories of the first American women law professors. It was so important to Justice Ginsburg that their stories be preserved. It was because, as she said, we “stand on the shoulders of those brave people”—all the women who paved the way for us in every walk of life—that we must preserve their stories and our collective “Women’s History.”