SAN DIEGANS RECALL GINSBURG AS MENTOR, FRIEND

U.S. Supreme Court justice an occasional visitor to the city

When M. Margaret Mckeown was in her final year at Georgetown law school, in 1975, she took a class on sex discrimination. It was a new field, and there weren’t a lot of books or other resources available, which was a problem when it came time to write a term paper.

A professor suggested that Mckeown reach out to a scholar at Columbia University’s law school who might help (and did): Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

After John B. Owens graduated from Stanford law in 1996, he sought a clerkship at the U.S. Supreme Court and applied to all nine justices. The one who responded and eventually hired him? Ginsburg.

Now Mckeown and Owens are judges themselves, based in San Diego, and Saturday they were mourning Ginsburg as both a mentor and a friend.

“We’ll never see another one like her again,” Owens said.

Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court and a pioneering force for gender equality, died Friday from complications of pancreatic cancer. She was 87.

Mckeown said her relationship with Ginsburg “blossomed into a wonderful friendship” starting in 1998, when Mckeown became a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

They taught at conferences together overseas, dined at each other’s homes, and went to opera and classical music performances in Washington, D.C., and San Diego.

“One on one, she could be quite playful and funny and engaged,” Mckeown said. “Anybody who spent time with her recognized she had a stunning intellect, and it was coupled with an amazingly warm heart. And always there was a moral compass that was pointed toward justice and equality.”

In February, at Georgetown, Mckeown interviewed Ginsburg in front of a crowd of law students and others to mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. It was one of Ginsburg’s last public appearances.

They talked about suffragists — Ginsburg’s mother marched in parades — and the law, and they talked about the justice’s emergence in recent years as a cultural icon: the Notorious RBG, the subject of books and movies and bobblehead dolls.

“I wondered when all that started how she would react,” Mckeown said Saturday

in a phone interview. “Will she think this is dismissive of the serious work of the court? But she embraced it. She got a real kick out of it, which I think helped open her up and endeared her to the public.”

Owens, too, was impressed by the Notorious RBG phenomenon. “A part of her emerged that I had not seen before,” he said.

The part the 9th Circuit appellate judge remembers, from his one-year clerkship in 1997-98, is how hard Ginsburg worked, and how often she listened before speaking.

“What she stressed is that A-minus work isn’t going to cut it, especially at the Supreme Court,” he said. “She was so tough and determined. Not everybody has that kind of motor. She wasn’t going to let anything stop her.”

Owens said it’s an open question whether history will remember Ginsburg more as a litigator or a justice. “Everybody knows her from the Supreme Court, but in many ways her career as a lawyer eclipses what she did on the bench,” he said, referring to the gender-discrimination cases she argued and won in the 1970s.

“She was such a huge architect of change,” he said.

His term at the court was quiet, with few major cases, but that allowed it to be instructive in another way. He saw how Ginsburg got along with the other justices, even the ones she frequently disagreed with. She believed in building consensus, Owens said, and her approach was patient: more tortoise than hare.

“A court can’t function if everyone is screaming at each other,” he said. “And not to get too political here, but it doesn’t work for the country, either.”

Ginsburg visited San Diego occasionally over the years. She spoke at the Thomas Jefferson School of

Law’s annual Women and the Law Conference in 2003 and created a lecture series that presents the keynote speech at the event every year. It’s named after her. She came back in 2013 for a question-and-answer session with conference participants.

She’s an ongoing presence in at least one local law office, too. Last year, the Zalkin Law Firm commissioned a painting of Ginsburg by Rod Benson, who grew up in San Diego. Done in a style Benson refers to as “purpose driven pop art,” it hangs in the conference room.

“She was a champion of civil justice for everyone,” said Irwin Zalkin, founding partner. “We go into that room for our meetings and she’s there, inspiring us.”

Staff writer Kristina Davis contributed to this report.

john.wilkens@sduniontribune.com