SAN FRANCISCO — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s lifelong crusade for gender equity has become such a defining aspect of her legal legacy that it follows her on vacation.
Ginsburg, at 78 the eldest justice on the high court, addressed a crowd of about 350 Thursday evening in San Francisco. Her appearance, presented by UC Hastings College of the Law, was not all about case studies — she drew laughs on several occasions with stories of her personal life. An elephant ride with fellow Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia on a trip to India, for example.
“It was quite a magnificent, very elegant elephant,” Ginsburg said. “And my feminist friends, when they see the photograph of Ginsburg and Scalia on this elephant, say, ‘Ruth, why are you sitting in the back?’ “
Answering questions from Hastings professor Joan Williams, Ginsburg traced her passion for equal rights to her mother, who encouraged her “to be a lady, and to be independent. She felt it important that a woman be self-standing.”
That view was shared by Ginsburg’s husband, Marty, who made her career a priority above his own.
“Marty was so confident of himself that he never thought of me as a threat,” Ginsburg said of her husband, who died in 2010.
That paved the way for Ginsburg’s ascendant career. She began as a law professor at Rutgers. She moved to Cornell, at the same time beginning work with the ACLU, where her passion met its moment.
“The question is,” Williams asked, “what made you think you could get the court to overrule over a century of precedent (regarding women’s rights)?”
“The times,” Ginsburg said. “The court is a reactive institution. It’s never at the forefront of social change. There’s always a movement in society that’s pushing the court. By 1970, the women’s movement was revived, not just in the United States, but all over the world. It was an issue that people cared about.”
Ginsburg argued that gender discrimination violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Even as she won legal challenges, she saw anecdotal evidence of Victorian attitudes in everyday life. After she was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit:
“At parties I was introduced as Justice Ginsburg, and a hand would extend to Marty. That,” she said with a smile, “didn’t happen when I was appointed to the Supreme Court.”
Ginsburg doubts she would be seated on the Supreme Court today given the scrutiny of the 24-hour news cycle and the partisan divide in Washington. In fact, when she was nominated by President Clinton in 1993, there were concerns her affiliation with the ACLU would be an issue. Though she was prepared for an onslaught of ACLU-related questions, not one was asked during her confirmation hearing.
“Someday we will get back to the way it once was,” she said, “but it will take people on both sides of the aisle with sense who really care about making government work.”
Ginsburg said one of the things she likes most about her job is the collegial relationship among the justices, citing the manner in which they rallied around her after her surgery and treatment for colon cancer in 1999, and her surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2009. The thing she likes least: Death penalty cases.
Asked what she would prefer to see as her legacy on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg said, “I would just like people to think of me as a judge who did the best she would with whatever limited talent I have to keep our country true to what makes it a great nation.”
