FIGHTER WITH
Ginsburg’s former law clerks recall her passion for
Former law clerks of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Saturday remembered the 87-year-old jurist as a quiet “fighter with a pen” who not only became their personal and professional role model, but transformed the lives of millions of ordinary Americans.
“No women would have the life they have today without everything she did,” said Queens native Ruthanne Deutsch, Bader’s clerk in the 2007-08 term and now a partner in Deutsch Hunt in Virginia.
Deutsch said Ginsburg’s influence extended right down to a personal connection with the young lawyers she mentored.
“I interviewed for my clerkship with her — a second career lawyer when I started law school,” Deutsch said. “She was very supportive and admiring of that. … She understood what it meant to pursue a dream and take care of her family.”
Ginsburg herself was a famously “very late-at-night person,” Deutsch recalled. “I’d receive at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. a fax from her [of ] all her overnight edits. She was just going to bed.”
But it wasn’t only her clerks whom she cared for, Deutsch said.
“When there was a member of the court staff battling an illness — one of the women who was cleaning the chambers — I talked to her one day [about] a gift … she knew before anybody else and had already made [a donation].”
“If you were in her orbit, she cared about you and what you did … she saw people as complete human beings,” she said.
Deutsch said Ginsburg’s marriage to her husband, Marty, was also an example of “what a true partnership could be.”
Another clerk from that high court term, fellow New Yorker Zach Tripp, now a member of the Washington, D.C., law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, called his time under Ginsburg’s guidance a
“totally life-changing experience.”
“It was so humbling to get to work for someone like her,” he said. “She’s under 5 foot and a total giant, a total force of nature.”
“Ginsburg had a sign above one of her doors, a quote from the Torah, that translated to ‘Justice, justice ye shall pursue.’ She lived that every day.”
Tripp recalled one meeting at Ginsburg’s home at the Watergate, “and Marty was in the background, putting food in front of her.”
“At some point Marty got annoyed, ‘You got to eat breakfast — it’s almost time for dinner.’ They laughed. She was very focused on what she was doing.”
“She would never yell at anybody,” Tripp said. “She was a fighter with a pen, speaking very quietly,” he said, adding: “She was an incredible role model.”
Abbe Gluck, a professor of law at Yale and clerk for Ginsburg in the 2003-04 term, said the jurist “worked harder than anyone and taught me what it meant to do my work right and stand behind it.”
“She was also a role model as a working mother. Her vision of her men and women being truly equal was reflected in her marriage to Marty … both of them supported each other throughout their life. She had no better champion than him,” Gluck told the Daily News.
Gluck said what’s often forgotten is that it was Ginsburg’s 1971 case that, “for the first time, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a law as unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution on the ground it discriminated based on sex.”
“We need to remember now, the enormous trailblazer she was,” Gluck said.
“It’s amazing that a whole new generation of little girls idolize her — an 87-year-old as an idea of feminist strength,” she said. “But also those little girls should know what she did for them in the 1970s.”
“She was so strong, those of us who knew her thought she would live forever,” Gluck said.