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Photo by Todd Cheney
UCLA Photo |
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg meets with faculty and students during a daylong visit to the law school Jan. 27. She is now the only woman on the highest court in the nation after her colleague, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, retired last week.
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Supreme Court justice imparts advice on being a female lawyer and judge
BY AJAY SINGH
Today Staff Writer
When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated with flying colors from Columbia Law School in 1959, such was the national climate of gender inequality that not a single law firm in New York City was willing to employ her — and some had the gall to suggest she should apply for work as a secretary.
Remarkably, Ginsburg kept her cool. “The way you deal with that is not to be angry, not to be resentful, but to say I’m going to think of myself as a teacher to these people — to show them that women and mothers can do the job as well as any others,” Ginsburg said in a Jan. 27 conversation with law students, professors and guests in Dodd Hall, one of a series of events she attended during a campus visit.
Kenneth Karst, professor emeritus of law and a longtime friend of Ginsburg’s, introduced her to a live audience of 350 and about 150 others watching on closed circuit TV as one of just three U.S. Supreme Court justices in history who “deserve a place in the pantheon of American law because of their contributions as advocates to the growth of the law.” The other two, he said, are Louis Brandeis and Thurgood Marshall.
While Ginsburg was a professor at Rutgers and Columbia Uni-
versity in the 1970s, Karst added, she was “the most effective litigator in the field of women’s rights.”
Ginsburg reminisced about two of her favorite Supreme Court colleagues: the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and recently retired Justice Sandra Day O’ Connor, the first and only other woman to be appointed to the nation’s highest court.
A judge’s job, Ginsburg quoted Rehnquist as saying, is akin to that of “a referee at a basketball game who is obliged to call a foul against a member of the home team at a critical moment in the game. He will be soundly booed, but he is nonetheless obliged to call it as he saw it — not as the home crowd wants.”
Ginsburg said her secretaries once imagined that O’Connor had a secret twin sister to share all her extracurricular appearances. “The reality is she has an extraordinary ability to manage her time — why does she go to Des Moines, Lithuania or Rwanda when she might rather fly-fish, play tennis or golf?”
Ginsburg answered in what she said were O’Connor’s own words: “For both men and women, the first step in getting power is to become visible to others and then to put on an impressive show. As women achieve power, the barriers will fall; as society sees what women can do, there will be more women out there doing things, and we’ll all be better off for it.”
Asked whether Supreme Court confirmation hearings serve any purpose, Ginsburg recalled the time when former Chief Justice Warren Berger congratulated her on her nomination to the Supreme Court in 1993. When he was nominated to be chief justice in 1969, he told her, his confirmation hearing lasted exactly one hour.
Ginsburg’s lasted four days. “There’s one word that explains the difference — television,” she said, pointing out that marathon confirmation hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee are a relatively recent phenomenon. The hearings, she added, evoking laughter, are “a marvelous opportunity for senators to speak to their constituents to show how brilliant and caring they are about what the voters want.” |
