The day before Ruth Bader graduates from high school, her mother dies. Ruth finds herself before the bench of the Supreme Court where her mother Celia Bader is acting as Marshal of the Court. Ruth begins her journey of many steps packing for college. At Cornell, she meets Marty Ginsburg. They develop a strong friendship that evolves into romance. After they are married and have their first child, Ruth enters law school. Celia and the Justices of the Supreme Court (nine male and nine female) observe, comment on, and participate in Ruth's struggles to establish her legal career. Law firms and federal judges are biased against her because she is female, married, a mother, and Jewish. She finds her way by becoming a law school professor and co-director of the women's rights office created by the ACLU. Ruth's own experience lays the foundation for her advocacy of equal treatment of both sexes, which leads to adoption of the constitutional standards to evaluate sex discrimination. She is recognized for this by an appointment to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in 1980. There she develops a close friendship with Antonin Scalia, her opposite in interpreting the Constitution. Her jurisprudence and Marty's behind-the-scenes efforts lead to her nomination to the Supreme Court in 1993. Ruth develops a reputation as a forceful dissenter against the questionable holdings of the conservative majority on the Court. Her entire life has been touched by cancer: her mother's, Marty's two diagnoses, and her own. Before her death, she defends her evaluation of Roe v. Wade that almost lost her the SCOTUS nomination and privately expresses her feelings on the Senate Majority Leader's decision not to consider a replacement for Scalia until after the 2016 election. An advocate to the end and after, Ruth appears one last time before the bench of the Supreme Court to argue for adoption of the Equal Rights Amendment to protect her accomplishments in the area of sex discrimination.