JUSTICE TO MARK 25 YEARS ON HIGH COURT
she was absent from the Supreme Court bench, asking Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to announce her majority opinion in a closely divided case in which she tangled with the court’s newest member, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.
Then it was on to Rhode Island for a “fireside chat” at a law school and an appearance before more than 1,000 people at a Providence synagogue. Those engagements caused her to miss President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address. She had been a regular at President Barack Obama’s addresses.
At the synagogue, Ginsburg, who was sharply critical of Trump during the presidential campaign, said her talk had been planned before the date of his speech was announced.
“I’ll say no more,” she said. In response, a local reporter wrote, “the audience roared with knowing laughter.”
Eight days, after an appearance last week at a Washington synagogue, Ginsburg opened a three-day stand in New York City, speaking to 450 people at New York University’s law school, with more watching from an overflow room. She spoke at a New York Law School luncheon on Tuesday and appeared at Columbia University on Sunday.
Monday, she was scheduled to be in Philadelphia, visiting both the National Constitution Center and the University of Pennsylvania.
Her New York appearances week were studded with interesting remarks.
On Tuesday, for instance, she lamented the state of the Supreme Court confirmation process, recalling that Scalia had been confirmed unanimously and that only three senators voted against her nomination.
“For the last four nominees, it hasn’t been that way,” she said, noting that there had been substantial partisan opposition to the nominations of Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel Alito Jr., Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Ginsburg did not mention Gorsuch, who was confirmed by a vote of 54-45.
“My hope is that someday it will get back to the way it was,” shesaid.
Her colleagues, she said, had offered extraordinary support during her two bouts with cancer. Justice David Souter, who avoided the Washington social scene before his retirement in 2009, accompanied her to the opera. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who died in 2005, offered her a choice of majority opinions to write when she was facing chemotherapy.
“It never happened before,” she said of the offer, “and it never happened since.”
At the NYU discussion, Kenji Yoshino, a law professor, asked about a recent study that showed that female justices are interrupted more often than male ones.
Ginsburg said the article had gotten her attention. “Let’s see how it affects my colleagues,” she said. “I think it well may.”
She recalled the years when she was the only woman on the court, between Justice Sandra Day O’connor’s retirement in 2006 and Sotomayor’s arrival in 2009. For those three years, she said, she shared the bench with “eight rather well-fed men.”
Yoshino reminded her that she had delivered a famous lecture at NYU not long before she joined the Supreme Court. The lecture criticized Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion.
The Supreme Court had moved too fast, Ginsburg wrote at the time. It would have sufficed, she wrote, to strike down the extreme Texas law at issue in the case and then proceeded in measured steps in later cases to consider other abortion restrictions.
The trend in state legislatures in the early 1970s, she wrote, was toward more liberal abortion laws. The categorical Roe decision, she wrote, gave rise to “a well-organized and vocal rightto-life movement” that “succeeded, for a considerable time, in turning the legislative tide in the opposite direction.”
Her analysis is contested, as Ginsburg acknowledged to the NYU audience. “I know that there are many people who disagree with me on this subject,” shesaid.
Nadine Strossen, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a law professor at New York Law School, also asked about her critique of the Roe decision. Ginsburg did not retreat but again said there were two sides to the question. “This is a highly debatable topic,” she said.
Ginsburg will celebrate her 25th anniversary on the court in August. She was appointed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, who compared her work as a litigator for women’s rights to Thurgood Marshall’s work for racial equality.
The comparison was flawed, Ginsburg said Monday. “My life was never in danger,” she said. “His was. He went to a southern town in the morning, and he couldn’t be sure he’d be alive at the end of the day.”
On Tuesday, she said she still relished her work, recalling a satisfying behind-the-scenes victory. “I can’t disclose the opinion,” she said, describing a dissent she had drafted after a tentative 7-2 vote. Her draft persuaded five colleagues to sign it, and she ended up writing for the majority in a 6-3 decision.
“So,” Ginsburg said, “it ain’t over till it’s over.”