Ruth Bader Ginsburg
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Template:Infobox US Associate Justice Ruth Joan Bader Ginsburg (born March 15, 1933) is a United States jurist. Since 1993, she has served as an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. She is the first female Jewish Supreme Court Justice and is currently the only woman on the Court.
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Early life
Ginsburg was born Joan Ruth Bader in Brooklyn, New York, the second daughter of Nathan and Celia Bader. Ginsburg's older sister died when she was very young.
Ginsburg's mother called her "Kiki" (which her father found objectionable) and took an active role in Ruth's education, taking her to the library often and applying for scholarships that would allow her to attend college. Celia struggled with cancer throughout Ruth's high school years and died the day before graduation.
She married Martin D. Ginsburg (later a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and an internationally prominent tax lawyer) in 1954, and has a daughter, Jane, and a son, James.
Ginsburg received her B.A. from Cornell University in 1954 and attended Harvard Law School (before moving on to Columbia). Her husband, upon graduating from HLS accepted a job in New York City and she transferred to Columbia Law School, where she won a spot on the law review, becoming the first person ever to have been on law review at both Harvard and Columbia; she earned her LL.B. degree at Columbia, where she graduated not only first in her class but with the highest grades in the history of the law school, a trait she shares with Justice Stevens (who graduated with the highest grades in the history of Northwestern's law school). She finally accepted an offer to serve as a law clerk to the Honorable Edmund L. Palmieri, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, from 1959-1961. From 1961-1963, she was a research associate and then associate director of the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure, for which she learned Norwegian and Swedish in several months and became an intellectual leader in civil procedure. She was a Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law from 1963-1972, and Columbia Law School from 1972-1980, where she became the first ever woman to earn tenure and authored the first law book ever to be written on gender equality law and served as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford University, California from 1977-1978. She served as the chief litigator of the ACLU's women's rights project and argued in front of the Supreme Court numerous times, winning cases that reversed centuries of Court precedent that reinforced gender inequity and attaining a reputation as an extremely skilled oral advocate and equality litigator. After nominating her to the Supreme Court, President Clinton referred to her as the "Thurgood Marshall" of the women's movement.
Judicial career
Ginsburg was appointed a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Carter in 1980. President Clinton nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court on June 14, 1993. During her subsequent confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, she refused to answer questions regarding her personal views on most issues or how she would adjudicate certain hypothetical situations as a Supreme Court Justice. As she noted during the hearings, "Were I to rehearse here what I would say and how I would reason on such questions, I would act injudiciously." At the same time, however, Ginsburg did answer questions relating to some potentially controversial issues, for instance, she stated that she does believe that there is a constitutional right to privacy, and she explicated at some length on her personal judicial philosophy and thoughts regarding gender equality.[1] The U.S. Senate confirmed her by a 96 to 3 vote and she took her seat on August 10, 1993. She became the second woman and first Jewish woman to serve in the United States Supreme Court.
During her service on both the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, Ginsburg has generally been regarded as a liberal judge. Ginsburg has urged a cautious approach to adjudication, arguing in a speech given shortly before her nomination to the Supreme Court that "[m]easured motions seem to me right, in the main, for constitutional as well as common law adjudication. Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable." [2] Ginsburg has urged that the Supreme Court not wholly displace the legislative branches, but rather allow for dialogue with elected branches.
Though Ginsburg has consistently supported abortion rights and joined in the Supreme Court's opinion striking down Nebraska's partial-birth abortion law in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), she has criticized the court's ruling in Roe v. Wade as terminating a nascent, democratic movement to liberalize abortion laws which she contends might have built a more durable consensus in support of abortion rights. She has also been an advocate for the use and citation of foreign law and norms in judicial opinions, in contrast to the originalist views of her colleague Justice Antonin Scalia.
Ginsburg was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999 and underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatments. The condition appears to be arrested or in remission.
In September 2005, amidst speculation that a woman would replace retiring justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Ginsburg told the New York City Bar Association that she felt "any woman would not do", and that she had a list of names which she did not expect the President to read. She also defended her views on paying attention to rulings from other countries.
She is considered to be part of the "liberal wing" in the current court and has a Segal-Cover score of 0.680 placing her as the most liberal (by that measure) of current justices, although more moderate than those of many other post-War justices.
Some notable cases in which Ginsburg wrote an opinion:
- United States v. Virginia Court Opinion
- Bush v. Gore Dissenting
- Eldred v. Ashcroft Court Opinion
Dispute over relevance of international law
On March 1, 2005, in the case of Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court (in an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy) ruled in a 5-4 decision that the Constitution forbids executing convicts who committed their crimes before turning 18. In addition to the fact that most states now prohibit executions in such cases, the majority opinion reasoned that the United States was increasingly out of step with the world by allowing minors to be executed, saying "the United States now stands alone in a world that has turned its face against the juvenile death penalty."
Justice Antonin Scalia rejected that approach with strident criticism, saying that the justices' personal opinions and the opinions of "like-minded foreigners" should not be given a role in helping interpret the Constitution.
Ginsburg rejected that argument in a speech given about one month after Roper. "Judges in the United States are free to consult all manner of commentary," she said to several hundred lawyers, scholars, and other members of the American Society of International Law.[3] She cited several instances when the logic of foreign courts had helped untangle legal questions domestically, and of legislatures and courts abroad adopting U.S. law in return. Fears about relying too heavily on world opinion "should not lead us to abandon the effort to learn what we can from the experience and good thinking foreign sources may convey," Ginsburg told the audience.
In response to Roper and other recent decisions, several Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a resolution declaring that the "meaning of the Constitution of the United States should not be based on judgments, laws, or pronouncements of foreign institutions unless such foreign judgments, laws or pronouncements inform an understanding of the original meaning of the Constitution of the United States." A similar resolution was introduced in the U.S. Senate. In her speech, Ginsburg criticized the resolutions. "Although I doubt the resolutions will pass this Congress, it is disquieting that they have attracted sizable support," she said. "The notion that it is improper to look beyond the borders of the United States in grappling with hard questions has a certain kinship to the view that the U.S. Constitution is a document essentially frozen in time as of the date of its ratification," Ginsburg asserted. "Even more so today, the United States is subject to the scrutiny of a candid world," she said. "What the United States does, for good or for ill, continues to be watched by the international community, in particular by organizations concerned with the advancement of the rule of law and respect for human dignity."
"Ginsburg Precedent"
Over a decade passed between the time Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer were appointed and the time another justice left the court. In that time, both Congress and the White House had switched to Republican control. When Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement in the summer 2005 (with William Rehnquist's death a few months later), both sides began to squabble about just how many questions President George W. Bush's nominees would be expected to answer. The debate heated up when hearings for John Roberts began in September 2005. Republicans used an argument that they called the "Ginsburg Precedent", which centered on Ginsburg's confirmation hearings. In those hearings, she did not answer some questions involving matters such as abortion, gay rights, separation of church and state, rights of the disabled, and so on. Only one witness was allowed to testify "against" Ginsburg at her confirmation hearings, and the hearings only lasted four days. They also pointed out that then-Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden told her not to answer questions she did not feel comfortable answering.
In a September 28, 2005 speech at Wake Forest University Ginsburg said that Chief Justice Roberts refusing to answer questions on some cases was "unquestionably right." [4]
Democrats had argued against Roberts' refusal to answer certain questions, saying that she made her views very clear, even if she did not comment on all specific matters, and that due to her lengthy tenure as a judge, many of her legal opinions were already available for review. Democrats also pointed out that Republican senator Orrin Hatch had recommended Ginsburg to then-President Clinton, which suggested Clinton worked in a bipartisan manner. Hatch rebuts saying that that he had not "recommended" her but suggested to Clinton she might be a candidate that would not receive great opposition.
During the John Roberts confirmation hearings, Biden, Hatch, and Roberts himself brought up Ginsburg's hearings several times as they argued over how many questions she answered and how many Roberts was expected to answer. The "precedent" was again cited several times during the confirmation hearings for Justice Samuel Alito.
References
- Clinton, Bill (2005). My Life. Vintage. ISBN 140003003X.
- Referred to as coaching a basketball team in Futurama episode "The Cryonic Woman"
External links
- Supreme court official bio (PDF)
- Ginsburg's dissenting opinion in Bush v. Gore
- "The Ginsburg Precedent" video
- "Ginsburg Precedent is Misleading Propaganda"
- Supreme Court justice speaks at Wake Forest University, Winstom-Salem Journal
- Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution from the Jewish Women's Archive
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Categories: 1933 births | American law professors | American lawyers | Brooklynites | Columbia alumni | Harvard alumni | Jewish-American politicians | Judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit | Living people | Phi Beta Kappa members | Rutgers University | Stanford alumni | United States Supreme Court justices | Women lawyers