Lunch with Justice Ginsburg

Inaugurating the 125th year anniversary of the founding of Willamette University College of Law, both my alma mater and the place where I taught for four years, was today's visit of Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Later today she will have her "real talk" on law, but over lunch she had lighter fare for us, a fare that she seemed not the less eager to deliver for its being "light." In fact, since law and law professors are often self-consciously trying either to outdo or to "match" each other's "performance," especially at a conference, it was a welcome relief to have this exemplar of clear thinking and lucid conversation introduce us to some of the "softer" elements of the Court's life. Indeed, as you live longer, you begin to see "softer" sides of things not as either weak or unimportant but, in fact, as things that often define a person or institution. This essay mentions some of those "lighter things" she mentioned and then reflects on aspects of her life that were so obvious to those who met her today.

Formality Rules

Each day the Court meets for conference when it is in session, the nine members meet and each shakes hands with the other. Thus, there are 36 handshakes among Justices [Do the calculations. Justice A shakes 8 hands; Justice B only has 7 to shake, etc. This leads to 36 handshakes]. Each day they eat lunch with each other, usually getting six and sometimes all nine Justices. Often there are guests, and the criterion for a guest being asked back, she said, was whether he/she could eat and talk at the same time. The Justices eat the same fare as served in the Supreme Court refectory. On occasion they have dinners with each other and then with spouses and others who serve at the Court. She emphasized that the effect of these and other formal rules helps soften some of the harshness that inevitably creeps in through personality and legal differences. Her approach, however, is that collegiality and harmony prevail; she wouldn't be sympathetic to revisionists who might stress the off-putting personality of Justice Scalia, for example, or "factional fights" in the Court. A political science colleague of mine mused that she may have overstated the situation, but that is how she put it. I can't help but think, to support my colleague, that a few years ago when Justice Scalia was getting in the crosshairs of the media for going on hunting trips with Vice-President Cheney that there had to be much grumbling within the marble walls about the Justice's grandstanding.

Questions and Response

Her talk was an invitation to a conversation, and so a good one ensued. One person asked her about what was most "fun" about the Court. She mentioned that it had only happened twice or three times in her 15 years on the Court, but when she first circulates a "Dissent" among her colleagues and then it comes back to her as "Majority Opinion," with five or six Justices supporting it, she is absolutely overjoyed. What was her most difficult case? Well, she didn't want to speak about any particular case, but it is a class of cases--concerning capital punishment--which trouble her the most. She didn't mention her opinion on the death penalty; she just stressed the anxiety created by the realization that this Court is often the last resort before a needle is stuck into a condemned person's arm. One could have received the impression from her cautious and careful remarks that this power was almost more than humans should be called upon to exercise; she didn't expressly say that, however...

Other Things

When Nelson Mandela speaks, those "in the know" hear not only the words of the moment but hear the entire 90 years of his life and several decades of his struggle against the apartheid system. So, when one hears Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you can hear her on two levels. The more interesting level to hear her, in my judgment, is as a crusader/supporter of women's rights and as a mother/wife. I mention the latter not because that is an essential "role" of married women, in a sexist way, but because it overflows from her presentation. She and her husband obviously have had a marriage that for 54 years has stamped them both with grace, love, wisdom and mutual understanding. And, their older daughter Jane, who had given a lecture at the law school on Wednesday, was present also. One therefore got the sense that she is speaking in the context of family, a family that has provided strength and joy to her over the years. We were privileged to witness that affection and joy, even though there was not an attempt to flaunt it or "show it off."

Finally, however, when I heard Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I heard a woman who has experienced the ebb and flow of discriminatory treatment as a woman with grace and insight. I am sure that she didn't always feel so gracious, especially when she believed, not without reason, that had her law school colleagues at Rutgers known about her pregnancy with her second child in the early 1960s, her year-by-year contract would not have been renewed. I am sure that when the Dean of Harvard Law School inquired in the late 1950s how she and her 8 other female companions in her class at HLS felt about taking a position in the class that would otherwise be occupied by a man, she wasn't so positively inclined. Yet, she persisted, and used law as a means of opening opportunities for women, so that she could say without equivocation to a question about opportunities today that there really was no barrier in law for women today (though she did hint that the culture of "big law firms" needs to change).

Conclusion

Justice Ginsburg speaks in measured tones. You get the impression that she not only hears questions and words before she responds, but she savors them. She ponders them, holds them up to the light, and then responds, in a succinct and lucid manner. When I returned to the afternoon sessions of the conference, I was barraged again by words--mostly by professors in their 30s. For some reason, they seemed to be chattering, whereas Justice Ginsburg seemed to be really talking. I will take her "soft" talk any day.

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