Friends in High Places

How a surprise adventure turned into the story of a lifetime for two Supreme Court justices—and me

In the summer of 2001, my wife and I flew to Nice, France, to host Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The law school where I was dean had a summer program there, and Justice Ginsburg had agreed to give some lectures. I hadn’t met her before, and my wife, Leslie, and I were both pretty nervous, but the impeccable justice and her witty husband, Marty, were warmly conversational and easy to be with.

One day we were standing in our hotel lobby when Justice Ginsburg said, “That looks like fun.” Parasailors were flying above the sea. “I’d like to try it.”

Leslie and I laughed nervously. But Marty knew his wife well enough to take her musings seriously. “You’re crazy,” he said. Though I had no real desire to parasail, I did feel an obligation to look after Justice Ginsburg, so when she said she intended to go, I offered to join her.

The next morning, we all marched down to the beach. With a little dark humor, Marty told his wife, “I’ll remember you to our grandchildren.” Leslie, thinking about the future of the country, said to me, “If only one of you can be saved, it had better not be you!”

At the beach, the two of us were strapped into a tandem apparatus attached to a boat, and up we zoomed. I think we both had a jolt of fear as we took off, but we got comfortable pretty quickly. The view was spectacular, and the silence very peaceful. When we started dropping toward the

water, Justice Ginsburg seemed concerned, but once I reassured her that we’d go only low enough to touch the warm Mediterranean with our feet, she relaxed. Minutes later, we were greeted on the ground by our relieved spouses.

By the end of the week, after several dinners and concerts, we really felt that Ruth and Marty had become our friends. I saw Justice Ginsburg from time to time over the years, and rarely was the parasailing story not mentioned.

When I became dean at another law school, I would occasionally bring a group of alumni to be sworn into the Supreme Court Bar. Justice Ginsburg would come to the reception held in one of the lovely public rooms at the court and would usually tell our story. It was always fun to see the wide eyes of the alums as they heard it.

At some point, maybe eight years ago, I was contacted by Justice Ginsburg’s official biographers, who had heard about our parasailing and wanted to interview me. After we connected, I heard them do a media interview with her, and one of the writers told the story, using some of the very words I’d used. A couple of years later, a documentary filmmaker also contacted me for details, though because no photos or videos of our parasailing existed, she couldn’t use it in the resulting hit film, RBG.

In 2015, someone sent me a clip of Justices Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia doing a live interview about their odd couple friendship. As vehemently as they disagreed about the Constitution and other legal issues, the two justices had grown deeply fond of each other. When they had served together on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, they bonded over their shared love of opera and travel, and their families regularly spent New Year’s Eve together.

By this point, I had also become friends with Justice Scalia; he, too, had come to Nice years before to teach in our program. I remember how the parasailing adventure had come up back then and how he’d chuckled,

“I MEAN, SHE’S SO LIGHT, YOU WOULD THINK SHE WOULD NEVER COME DOWN.”

saying that there was no way he would do something that crazy. But I could see that he took great pride in his friend’s nerve.

Now, watching the interview years later, I chuckled as the parasailing came up again. Nino, as Justice Scalia was called, talked about how adventuresome Justice Ginsburg was. Much to my surprise, he told the parasailing story as if he had been there. “Ruth— honest to goodness—went up behind a motorboat,” he said on stage, with Justice Ginsburg to his right. “I mean, she’s so light, you would think she would never come down. I would never do that,” he continued.

I remember thinking, You weren’t there. I was! He clearly wasn’t lying or being self-aggrandizing. The story was about her, after all.

Not long after, I saw Justice Ginsburg in Chicago and asked her whether she had caught Scalia’s mistake. She somewhat sheepishly admitted she had and laughed. She appeared to have no problem with his enthusiastic confabulation. All is fair when friends exaggerate each other’s more appealing traits, it seems, and Justice Ginsburg’s impulse to sail over the water so appealed to her pal Nino that it was as if he’d been there.

I happened to have dinner with Justice Scalia and his wife, Maureen, a few months after seeing the interview. I told him I had seen it and thought it was great. He said he’d enjoyed doing it. Then I took a gulp of wine and said, “You know that story you told about seeing Ruth parasailing?”

“Yes,” he said with a smile.

“Well, you got that wrong. You weren’t there when it happened,” I said, and I went over the timeline.

He looked quite shocked and turned to Maureen. “Were we ever in the south of France with the Ginsburgs?” he asked her. She thought for a moment and said that no, they had never been there together.

Very graciously and with good humor, Justice Scalia accepted that he had misremembered and unintentionally inserted himself into this story. We kidded about all of our memories declining with age. But I’ve never thought that aging alone explained it. I think it was his love and respect for Ruth Bader Ginsburg that took Nino Scalia to the beach in Nice that day.