Natalie Portman will play Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a film chronicling Ginsburg’s fight for equal rights for women under the law. The film, Deadline Hollywood reports, will be entitled On The Basis of Sex.
The film will arrive not long after Justice Ginsburg emerged as a pop cultural icon, inspiring t-shirts with slogans ranging from “Notorious R.B.G.” to “Ruth Badass Ginsburg.” A book entitled Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is due out this October.
Ginsburg’s rise as a cultural icon, however, lags many of her greatest contributions to American law by four decades. In 1971, while still a practicing attorney, Ginsburg authored the brief in Reed v. Reed that convinced the Supreme Court to hold unanimously and for the first time that the Constitution’s promise of equal protection of the laws applies to women. Five years later, Ginsburg’s brief in Craig v. Boren convinced the Court to hold that all laws that engage in gender discrimination should be treated with skepticism under the Constitution.
Yet, as Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick notes, Ginsburg’s rise as a pop cultural icon comes at the very moment when many of the advances she secured as a lawyer seem most in jeopardy. Ginsburg’s dissent in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby was set to music, for example, but Ginsburg still dissented in Hobby Lobby — while five male justices gave many women’s bosses an unprecedented degree of influence over whether those women may use birth control.