Before Sandra Day O’Connor was nominated and confirmed to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1981, a handful of presidents, going back to Franklin Roosevelt, considered nine  women for high court vacancies.

The new book ”Shortlisted: Women in the Shadows of the Supreme Court”—from Renee Knake of the University of Houston Law Center and Hannah Brenner Johnson, vice dean of California Western School of Law in San Diego—”tells the overlooked stories” of those women. The book arose out of the authors’ study of media coverage of the nominations of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.