Natalie Portman has signed on to play the second-sexiest of all Supreme Court justices after William Howard Taft. She’ll star as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On The Basis Of Sex, a film that follows Ginsburg’s struggle for equal rights throughout her career. Written by Daniel Stiepleman, the script made the 2014 Black List. Focus Features will probably finance the movie, with The Diary Of A Teenage Girl’s Marielle Heller in talks to direct.
Though most casual Supreme Court fans just know the Notorious RBG as that severe-haired older woman kicking ass and taking names on the bench, Ginsburg had quite a legal career prior to her 1993 appointment. She is an outspoken advocate for women’s rights as a constitutional principle, and has been associated with the ACLU since the ’70s. She founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter in 1970—the first law journal in the U.S. to focus exclusively on the issue—and, while at Columbia in the late ’70s, co-authored the first law school textbook on sex discrimination. Prior to becoming a judge in 1980, Ginsburg also argued several landmark women’s rights cases in front of the Supreme Court, including Reed v. Reed, which extended the Equal Protection Clause to women for the first time.