For all the outrage and umbrage generated by Judge Sonia Sotomayor's comment from a 2001 speech "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life," there has been precious little analysis of her conclusions.

Sotomayor's speech, which dwelled a great deal on her personal background as a Latina woman, was more nuanced than that single quote makes it appear. She went on to offer supporting evidence for her opinion: "Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case." And also to temper it somewhat, saying: "We should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group."

But understanding takes time and effort, she went on to say. And, “Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see."

To those who decried this point of view as racist, sexist, and patently false, there is no better rebuttal than Fred Strebeigh's new book, "Equal: Women Reshape American Law".

The history of women in the law is fascinating to read. And it proves what Sotomayor contends: that it took women's entry into the field of law and concerted effort to change the incredibly sexist and benighted legal standards of only a few decades ago.

Take the section on Ruth Bader Ginsburg--the woman responsible for that 1972 sex discrimination case Sotomayor referred to, which changed history. While her classmates and colleagues esteemed her as brilliant, they didn't really understand "how radical she was," Strebeigh says of Ginsburg. Ginsburg's life experience--particularly her personal experience with discrimination, radicalized her, in his view.

Denied her first job after graduating at the top of her class at Cornell because she was pregnant, she later had her financial aid withdrawn by Harvard, because they decided her husband's parents should pay. The dean of Harvard Law asked her, along with the other nine women in a class with 500 men, what she was doing in law school taking a seat that could be held by a man. Later, despite her impressive credentials, she found doors closed to her at Manhattan law firms and Supreme Court clerkships because she was a woman.

Undaunted, Ginsburg set out to do for sex discrimination what Thurgood Marshall did for civil rights--to educate the Supreme Court, and the country, about the unequal status of women. She looked for a case that would demonstrate the reality of sex discrimination to men who, as she put it, thought, "What is sex discrimination? What are you talking about? I'm so good to my wife and daughter."

In her brilliant brief for the now-famous Reed case, Ginsburg changed history. She started by demonstrating the evolution of thought about women's place in society. Using a Supreme Court case that refused to declare a Michigan law unconstitutional for banning a woman and her daughter from working as bartenders, and thereby saving their livelihood after the husband and father in their family died. Felix Frankfurter wrote the opinion upholding the ban--and forcing the women to give up their family business, writing, "the Constitution does not require legislatures to reflect sociological insight, or shifting social standards," and speaking condescendingly of the "alewife, sprightly and ribald."

Ginsburg gave Frankfurter credit for evolving, pointing out that by the time he joined the majority in the Brown decision, he was willing to consider "sociological insight" and "social standards."

"Ginsburg, having in effect pulled from her bag of tricks a reformed Frankfurter, next pulled forth, more remarkably, the inspiration for his reformation," Strebeigh writes--Oliver Wendell Holmes, and a quote Frankfurter had used from Holmes: "It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past."

Did Ginsburg herself think she knew more than the august white males in her field? Well, yes. Of Justice Felix Frankfurter, whom she had credited with an evolving view of women in society, she later conceded she found his reasoning sloppy and thoughtless, with his silly references to "a merry old alewife." Still, for her own purposes, she made him look wiser than he was.

Ginsburg knew what any member of an oppressed class knows: that the old stereotypes that seem so comfortable and intuitively true to those in power are not immutable. they can be changed by sheer force of will, of activism, and of the law.

Take that, you strict constructionists. May the Right be right that, in Sotomayor, another secret radical is inching her way onto the Court.