Ruth Bader Ginsburg | Academy of Achievement (2024)

You’ve spent yourlife in the law. Were there lawyers in your family?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: There were no lawyers in my family. My father came to the United States from Russia when he was 13, and apart from night school to learn English, he had no formal schooling. My mother was the sixth child to be born in her large family, and the first one born in the U.S.A. She was born four months after her parents arrived.

From where?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: From Austria. And she was a very good student; she graduated high school at age 15 and then went immediately to work so that she could help support the eldest son, who was going to Cornell University. In those families, the eldest son was the one on whom the most attention was lavished, and no one thought about sending girls to higher education.

Did she work while you were growing up?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: No, because,I think my mother would have thrived had she worked. But when she was married, it was considered a disgrace to a man that his wife worked. It would mean that he was unable to support her. So she stopped working when she married, but she was always helpful to my father in his work. In fact, when she died — she died when I was 17, just before I was to graduate from high school — when she died his business went downhill, because she was a very important part of keeping it afloat.

What was his business?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: He was a manufacturer of furs.

What kind of student were you? You went to public schools, we understand.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I went to P.S. 238 in Brooklyn and to James Madison High School in Brooklyn. I was a good student, in some part to please my mother. I wanted to bring home a report card that she would find satisfactory.

What was your mother like?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: My mother was a voracious reader. And one gift that she gave me was loving to read. My favorite memory was sitting on her lap, she would read books to me. We had a daily — a weekly excursion to the public library. And she would leave me in the library in the children’s section, have her hair done, and then pick me up when I had my three or four books for the week.

You spoke about her on the day you were nominated to the Court in the Rose Garden. What do you think she would make of you?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I think she would be surprised — and no end pleased. My mother was born in an era when it was a disgrace for a married woman to work, if her husband could support her. And so my mother ,who started working when she was 15 — she graduated high school at 15 — went immediately to work, so she could help the family while the eldest son went off to Cornell. He was the only one in the family that had a college education. So then she did not work once she married. I think she wished that she had been able to continue.

Do you remember enjoying particular books when you were growing up?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I think that most girls who grew up when I did were very fond of the Nancy Drew series. Not because they were well written, they weren’t, but because this was a girl who was an adventurer, who could think for herself, who was the dominant person in her relationship with her young boyfriend. So the Nancy Drew series made girls feel good, that they could be achievers and they didn’t have to take a back seat or be wallflowers. So the Nancy Drew series was important to me. When I was even younger, I loved mythology. I loved Greek mythology and Norse mythology.

So then you go off to Cornell. What was that like?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Cornell in the early ’50s was considered a great school for girls because there were four men to every woman. It was a strict quota system. That meant the women were ever so much smarter than the boys. But it wasn’t the thing to do to show how smart you were. It was much better that you gave the impression that you weren’t working at all, that you were a party girl. So I did my studying in various bathrooms on the campus. Then when I went back to the dormitory, I didn’t have homework to do.

You had some wonderful professors, and you’ve talked about your literature professor in particular, who is a pretty famous guy.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Nabokov. Yes.

Vladimir Nabokov?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. Vladimir, the author of Lolita and many other things. He was a man who was in love with the sound of words, and he would read aloud from the books that were assigned, and showed us how a writer could paint pictures with words and how important having the right word in the right place would be. He gave an example of why he liked writing in the English language. I’m not sure that his first language was Russian. It may have been French. But the example that he gave was if you’re speaking French and you want to refer to a white horse so you say cheval blanc, first you see the horse and “horse” stimulates “brown” in your mind. Then you have to readjust it with “white.” But in English, “white” comes before “horse,” so you see the white horse immediately. That was the kind of thing that was important to Nabokov. He was a marvelous teacher, wonderfully amusing.

At Cornell, you met Marty Ginsburg. At first you were just friends, but you realized pretty soon that he was different than the other boys.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. I many times said that Marty Ginsburg was the first boy I met who cared that I had a brain.

And he liked that you had a brain.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: He was extraordinary in that respect. Yes.

When you married Marty, you got a second mother, his mother. She gave you some important advice that you say has served you well through life.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg:: My mother-in-law’s advice, which she gave me on the day of our wedding — we were married in Marty’s home, and his mother took me into the bedroom, her bedroom and said, “Dear, I’d like to tell you the secret of a happy marriage.” “Yes. What is the secret?” “It helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” And I found that advice — it stood me in very good stead not only in a wonderful marriage that lasted well over half a century, but in every workplace I’ve served, dealing with my faculty colleagues when I was a law teacher, and even now with my colleagues on the Supreme Court. When an unkind word is said, a thoughtless word, best to tune out.

The two of you ended up at Harvard Law School. You were one of nine women in your first year at Harvard. And you weren’t exactly greeted with open arms, were you?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg:: The nine of us were greeted by the dean, Dean Erwin, at a dinner he held in his home. He invited the nine women, and each of us had a faculty escort. My escort was Herbert Wexler, later my colleague at Columbia. He was a man who looked more like God than anyone I’d ever seen. I was totally taken with him but intimidated because he was so brilliant. Anyway, we had a meal. It was not a memorable meal. And there was no wine because the dean was a teetotaler. And then he had the chairs in his living room arranged in a semicircle and asked each of us in turn to say what we were doing at the Harvard Law School occupying a seat that could be held by a man. And most of us were embarrassed by the question, but years later when the dean became a friend, I realized what he was trying to do. The dean was not known for his sense of humor. Harvard didn’t admit women until 1950-’51, was the first year the law school admitted women. There were still doubting Thomases on the faculty. And the dean wanted to be armed with stories from the women themselves about what they would do with a law degree. So that’s why he asked the question. Of course, the women in my class didn’t exactly comprehend that at the time, but one of them gave him a perfect answer. Mine was far from perfect. But this was Flora Schnall. She had a distinguished career as a lawyer. She said, “Dean Griswold, there are nine of us. Well, really Ruth Ginsburg doesn’t count for this purpose. So there are eight, and there are over 500 of them. What better place to find a man?” And the dean, I think, was horrified by that answer, but she was the only one who treated it in the way it should have been treated.

For the most part, my professors treated the women in the class fairly. There was no such thing as “Ladies’ Day” in any of my classes. “Ladies’ Day” was notorious in law schools. It was the day when only women were called on and the rest of the year they were ignored. I did not have that experience, but I did have this experience: The nine of us were divided into four sections, so that meant most of us were in a room with just one other woman. If we were called on, we worried that if we failed, if we didn’t give the right answer, we would be failing not just for ourselves, but for all women. It is somewhat similar to people saying, when a car takes a wrong turn, “What would you expect? It’s a woman driver.” So we were on our toes. We were always well prepared. Years later, when women were beginning to come to law school in numbers in the 1970s, I was then teaching at Columbia, and one of my colleagues said that he really longed for the good old days when there were few women in the class, because he said if things were going slowly and you needed a crisp right answer, you called on the woman. She was always prepared. She would give you the right answer and then the class could move along. “But nowadays,” he said, “there’s no difference. The women are as unprepared as the men.”

At Harvard you and Marty had a three-year-old daughter.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Jane was 14 months when I started.

So you have a daughter. You were eventually on law review. You’re juggling schedules, and he’s diagnosed with testicular cancer, which at the time was a very serious thing. We have much better ways of treating that now.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Daily radiation that seemed to go on forever. The doctor said four weeks, and then four weeks were over, and there was a fifth week and a sixth week. It was the only thing they had. It was massive radiation. It wasn’t pinpointed the way it is today.

How did you get through this time? He was very sick. You were taking care of him. You were typing his papers. You were getting notes from his classes. You were taking care of Jane. How did the two of you get through this period?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: We never thought about the possibility or never talked about the possibility that he might not survive. We were concentrating on getting him through the third year. And by the way, Marty went to classes for only two weeks, the last two weeks of the semester. In that semester he got the highest grades that he ever got in law school because he had the best tutors. And Harvard was known as a competitive place. My experience was the opposite. His classmates, my classmates rallied around the two of us and prepared individual tutorials to help prepare him for the exams. How did I get through it? Well, I was able to get by with very little sleep. Because of the radiation, Marty couldn’t ingest anything until midnight. And so between midnight and two he had dinner, my bad hamburger usually. And then he would dictate to me his senior paper, and then he’d go back to sleep. And it was about 2:00 when I’d take out the books and start reading what I needed to read to be prepared for classes the next day.

Was this the beginning of the schedule you keep now, when you work all night and don’t get up until noon unless you’re on the bench?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes, except in those days I was much younger so I could get up early in the morning in time to make my first class, which sometimes was 8:00.

A famous Justice of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter, was asked to consider hiring you as one of his law clerks. You had amazing qualifications, having been on the law reviews of both Columbia and Harvard. You were recommended by a Harvard professor. And you tied for first place in your graduating class at Columbia. What was Justice Frankfurter’s reaction?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Justice Frankfurter, like his colleagues, was just not prepared to hire a woman. Now these were pre-Title VII days, so there was nothing unlawful about discriminating against women. And gentlemen of a certain age at that time felt that they would be discomfited by a woman in chambers, that they might have to watch what they say, they might have to censor their speech. It was surprising that Frankfurter had that typical, in those days, reaction, because he was the first justice to hire an African American as a law clerk some years before. But as I said, like many other federal judges of the time, he just wasn’t prepared to hire a woman.

The famous Judge Learned Hand told you why he wouldn’t hire you.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Judge Learned Hand was a brilliant jurist, and I wanted to clerk for him more than anything, even more than for a Supreme Court Justice. And my judge, Judge Palmieri, he lived around the corner from Judge Hand and would drive Judge Hand into work and back. And whenever I was finished early enough, I would join them on that ride. I’d sit in the back of the car. And this great man would say anything that came into his head. He sang songs at the top of his lungs. He used words that I never heard. And I asked him, “Judge Hand, I don’t seem to inhibit your speech when you’re in the car. Why won’t you consider me as a law clerk?” And he said, “Young lady, I am not looking at you.” For a man of that time, of that age, you didn’t use bad language in front of a lady.

When I applied for law firm jobs, Columbia had an excellent placement office, but sign-up sheets would go up and many would say “men only.” I had, as I have sometimes explained, three strikes that put me out when it came to employment as a lawyer. One is I am Jewish and the law firms were just beginning to stop discriminating on the basis of religion. That affected Catholics as well as Jews. They were opening up to all people without regard to religion. And some, a precious few, were ready to try a woman, but none were willing to take a chance on a mother, and my daughter was four years old when I graduated from law school. So of course I was disappointed, but it wasn’t unexpected.

You’ve said that Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex made a great impression on you.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex the first time I was in Sweden. And I was observing a society that was more advanced than we were in recognizing women’s talent and capacities. At that time, 1962, women were less than three percent of the law students in the United States. They were already 20 percent in Sweden. There was a woman writing a column in the Stockholm daily paper to this effect: why should the woman have two jobs and the man only one? In Sweden it was already not only accepted but expected that there would be two-earner families. Inflation was high, and if you wanted to do well by your children, you needed two incomes. But she was expected to have dinner on the table at seven, buy the children’s new shoes, take them for the medical checkups and the rest. And this columnist, whose name was Eva Moberg, her question was, “Shouldn’t he do more than take out the garbage?” And there were many, many people talking about that. So I was listening to these conversations at the same time as I was reading The Second Sex, which is an eye opener.

Why is it an eye opener?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Because of the irrational differences. She shows the differences between the way women are treated, the way men are treated, and it doesn’t inevitably have to be that way. There were some societies that she commented on where the woman is the queen bee.

So you ended up eventually as a professor at Rutgers Law School, where you actually hid your own pregnancy.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: That was a wonderful thing that happened because Marty was told after all that radiation that it would be impossible for us to have a second child. So that was very good news. But there was no amniocentesis at the time, and we didn’t know what James would turn out to be. But in any event, at that time it was my second year at Rutgers. I had a year-to-year contract. And I was pretty sure that if I told them I was pregnant, I wouldn’t get a contract for the next year. So I wore my mother-in-law’s clothes. It was just right. She was one size larger. And I got through the spring semester. When I had the new contract in hand, I told my colleagues when I came back in the fall, there would be one more in our family. So they stopped thinking that I was gaining a lot of weight.

You have said that, in a sense, you yourself were a product of affirmative action in being hired by Columbia in the early 1960s. Were they looking to diversify their faculty?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. The Women’s Movement came alive in the United States in the late ‘60s, and the government in those days was heavily into affirmative action. People don’t remember that affirmative action became a major item during Nixon’s administration, and it started in the construction trades, which were highly exclusionary. There was a good deal of nepotism, so you got a starting job as an apprentice if your father or your uncle was a member of the union.

And it was Nixon’s Secretary of Labor who thought that the best way to break that exclusion was to have people who have contracts with government — and many people do — pledge to do two things. One was to set goals and timetables, the assumption was, now let’s assume there would be no discrimination, about how many members of a minority group might be expected. So you set that number as the goal and a timetable for when you would achieve it. And this was not something that was absolute. If there was a good reason why you couldn’t comply, so be it.

But it was necessary for people who held government contracts at least to make an effort. And most colleges and universities had government money of some sort. There was a very active office for civil rights in the then Department of Health, Education and Welfare. And the head of that office was a man named Stan Pottinger. He was visiting colleges and universities all over America to encourage them to fulfill their affirmative action obligations, and also to remind them that if they didn’t, there was a possibility that their contracts might be suspended or even terminated. So in the year 1972 Columbia named two people to the faculty. One was an African American man and one was a woman, the first ever hired in a tenured post.

And that was you?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes.

How is it, going back to your alma mater, going back to Columbia?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I go to Columbia regularly. I have a very close tie to Columbia because my daughter is on the Columbia Law School faculty, and a former law clerk is the dean. David Schizer is the Dean of the Columbia Law School. His mother was a classmate of mine at Columbia. So I have strong connections to the Columbia Law School.

And he was a law clerk of yours?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes. David Schizer, who is now the Dean of Columbia Law School. My second year on the Supreme Court — so it would have been 1994 to ’95 —he was my very excellent law clerk.

When you became the first tenured woman on the faculty of Columbia Law School, did you feel some resentment from fellow faculty members, or by then was it more accepted?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I had a great deal of support from my faculty colleagues. None of them were resentful. Most of them were so secure about themselves and the excellence of the Columbia faculty, their idea was that if Columbia decided to engage me to be a tenured professor, then I must be really good. And even if I were doing things that they didn’t, that they would disagree with, they were backing me up. One example: I was named the law school’s representative on the university senate. Women who were teaching in the university had a suspicion that they were not getting equal pay, so the start to finding out if that suspicion was right was finding out just what salaries the university was paying. And the administration’s answer was that’s secret information, all kinds of jealousies would result if we published them. And of course, you couldn’t find out if Columbia was meeting its equal pay obligations without that information, which we eventually got, and the suspicions proved right.

That you were paid less than your male colleagues.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I wasn’t, because coming on in 1972 they made certain that I would be treated as well as my male peers. But women who had worked at the university for years, who came on in the days when it was accepted to pay women less.

And these were faculty members?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Faculty or top administrators. The hardest thing for my colleagues to accept was when we — and by we, I mean the ACLU women’s rights project, which I helped to found — challenged the TIAA CREF program, and the retirement program used by most colleges and universities, because they rigidly separated the policy beneficiaries by sex. So they used mortality tables for men, for women. And the women would get less when they retired than a man with equivalent salary and time in service. The reason was that on average it’s fair, because women on average live longer than men. And my view was, “Yes, that’s certainly true on average, but there are some men who live long and some women who die early.” And the whole notion is that you don’t lump together women simply because they are women, and that TIAA CREF should merge their mortality tables. Well, the immediate response was, “Horrors! We just couldn’t do that! Then all the men would desert the plan and get private insurance.” Well, TIAA CREF was such a good deal that when they did finally merge the tables, nobody left. But that was the most worrisome thing to my faculty colleagues. Even so, they supported a class action that was brought with 100 named plaintiffs on behalf of women teachers and administrators at Columbia, charging that maintaining separate mortality tables essentially denied women equal pay, and was in violation of our foremost anti-discrimination law: Title VII.

Justice Ginsburg, may we ask what you are most proud of having accomplished so far in your career?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I was fortunate to be born at the right time and to be in the right place when the Women’s Movement came alive. So many things were wrong with the way life was ordered in the ’70s. In many states, women didn’t serve on juries, to take just one example, and there were so many jobs that were off limits to women. People began to realize there was something wrong about that, and women should be free to aspire and achieve just as men are. So I had legal education, and I could use that education to help move this movement for change, for allowing women to realize their full potential, help move that along. So it was that ten years of my life that I devoted to litigating cases about — I don’t say women’s rights — I say the constitutional principle of the equal citizenship stature of men and women. I was tremendously fortunate to be able to participate in that movement for change.

You eventually went to Columbia, where you formed the ACLU Women’s Project, and you brought a whole series of cases. You often liked to have male clients. Why was that?

Ruth Bader Ginsberg: Like Charles E. Moritz, like Stephen Wiesenfeld. Stephen Wiesenfeld’s case was even more compelling than Charles E. Moritz. Stephen Wiesenfeld’s wife died in childbirth. She had been a school teacher. She earned slightly more than he did. When she died, Stephen went to the Social Security office. He thought that if he worked part-time up to the ceiling that Social Security allowed you to earn, the Social Security benefits plus what he could earn on top of that, he could just about make it and take care of his child and not go to work full-time until the child was in school a full day. So he went to the Social Security office and asked for what he was told were child-in-care benefits. And he was told, “We’re very sorry, Mr. Wiesenfeld. Those are mother’s benefits. They’re not available to fathers.” So he was the person who immediately felt the effect of the law. But where did that discrimination begin? It began with the woman as wage earner. Women paid the same Social Security tax that men paid, but it didn’t net for their family the same protection. Same tax but unequal protection. So we could say Stephen Wiesenfeld is feeling the effect of this discrimination, but it began with his wife, the wage earner, who was not treated as a full wage earner. She was a woman wage earner, and that meant she was secondary, she was earning pin money, no Social Security benefits for her family when she dies.

So the woman was discriminated against as wage earner, the male as parent, and that conformed to what was the basic separation that the man was the breadwinner, the woman was responsible for care of the home and children. So again, we never challenged how life was for most people. We said stereotypes, while there are stereotypes that are true in general, but there were many people who don’t fit the mold. And the whole object in the 1970s — through first public education — then attempt to change the laws by going to the state legislatures and Congress, and finally the courts were there as a last resort.

The idea I think was best expressed in a song that Ms. magazine published, and I think it was Marlo Thomas who was involved. The song is Free to be You and Me, and that was the idea. That male or female, you should be free to follow your star, to develop your talent, and you shouldn’t be held back by artificial barriers.

You said that some laws that would seem, on the surface, to help women, in a way discriminate, because it implies that women need more help than men.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: That women need to be protected. That was true. Our legislation said women couldn’t work more than eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. And that might have been fine in the days of sweatshops when some employers required women to work six days a week, 12 hours a day. But over the years, especially with unions protecting workers, the workday shrunk from 12 hours to ten hours to eight. And then if an employer wanted more hours, the employer would have to pay time-and-a-half or double time for those additional hours. So the hours laws that started out to protect women from sweatshop conditions ended up protecting men’s jobs from women’s competition. If an employer has two choices, a woman who cannot be engaged to work overtime and a man who is willing to do that, he would pick the man. So the protections over time came to be not protections, but barriers for women.

To take another simple example, women couldn’t be engaged to work at night. No night work. Well, if a woman is a waitress, the most lucrative tips — at banquets and such — come in the evening, not at lunchtime. So women came to realize that these old-style protections were not genuine protections for women, but they helped to keep things the way they were where there was this sharp divide between what women do and what men do, and the notion was to break down those stereotypes. So if a man wants to go to a nursing school, then that’s okay, that’s fine. And if a woman wants to be an engineer, a doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, that’s fine too. And now it’s not at all extraordinary for a woman to be any of those things.

You argued six cases before the Supreme Court and you won five of them. You wrote briefs in dozens more. What were you trying to achieve in the Oklahoma caseCraig v. Boren?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The “near-beer” case, Craig against Boren. Well, when we started out, there were two levels of review of cases that relied on the equal protection principle. One level was the highest. It was labeled strict scrutiny. It was reserved for discrimination on the basis of race. Everyone knew that racial discrimination was odious, should not be permitted. So a racial classification that adversely affected the minority race got this high level of review, was looked at very suspiciously. Everything else, the test was “rational basis,” which some people say, “Rational basis, all you have to do to get a law accepted by the Supreme Court is pass the lunatic test. If it isn’t lunatic, then it’s okay. Then Congress has the authority to do that.”

We needed to ratchet up that level. And incidentally, I looked at all of the Supreme Court cases involving equal protection and was able to get out some phrases here and there that suggested a higher level of review, something more than the lunatic test. So our object was to ratchet up the review standard for gender-based discrimination. It was interesting that in the turning point case, Reed v. Reed, the Court didn’t even mention that it was doing something new, that the law in question, yes, it would have passed the rational basis test, but they held it was no good. This was a law of the State of Idaho that said as between persons equally entitled to administer a decedent’s estate, males must be preferred to females. Simple as that. And the rival contenders in that case were Sally Reed and Cecil Reed. They had a teenage son. They were divorced. When the boy was what the law calls “of tender years,” when he was young, the mother had custody. When the boy reached his teens, the father said, “Now he needs to be prepared for a man’s world so I should be the custodian.” Sally didn’t like that idea at all, but she objected in vain. Sadly she turned out to be right. The boy, living with his father, became terribly depressed and one day took out one of his father’s many guns and committed suicide. So Sally wanted to be appointed administrator to his estate. She couldn’t. Why? Males must be preferred to females. Why would we have such a law? Because in the ancient days in the 19^th century, before the Married Women’s Property Acts were passed, women — if they married — couldn’t sue and be sued, they couldn’t make contracts in their own name, they couldn’t hold property in their own name. So if you had a choice between two people to be the administrator of the decedent’s estate, of course you’d pick the competent person, one who can make contracts, the one who can hold property, the one who can sue and be sued. That’s why there were such laws on the books.

When you were litigating all these cases, running the ACLU project, arguing cases in the Supreme Court, your son was getting in trouble all the time at school.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: My son was a lively child. I called him lively. His teachers called him hyperactive. And I would get calls at least once a month to please come down to the school to meet with the room teacher or the school psychologist or the principal to hear about my son’s latest escapade. And one day I was at my office in Columbia, very tired because I had stayed up all night writing a brief. And I got the call. This time I said, “This child has two parents. Please alternate calls. And this time it’s his father’s turn.” So Marty went down to the school. He left his law office, met with three stone faces who disclosed my son’s latest offense. What did he do? He stole the elevator. It was a hand-held elevator that the elevator operator—in those days people were still smoking — the operator went out to have a cigarette, and one of my son’s classmates dared him to take a group of kindergarteners up to the top floor in the elevator, which he did. So Marty’s response on being told that your son stole the elevator was, “How far could he take it?” So I don’t know whether it was Marty’s wonderful sense of humor or the reluctance of the school to call a father away from his work, but then we got the calls barely once a semester, although there was no quick change in James’s behavior. People were much more reluctant to take a man away from his work than a woman.

You give a great deal of credit for the abortion decision and the affirmative action decision this term, and a couple of decisions last term, to one of the more conservative members of the court, Justice Kennedy. The abortion decision you said was particularly difficult for him.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: It was very difficult for him, but I think he sensed that what was going on with those restrictions, they were severe restrictions that it was a sham to say they protected women’s health. What they did was make access to abortion almost impossible for many poor women — or access to a safe abortion — thus driving them to back-alley abortionists the way it was in the not-so-good old days. So I thought that the Court recognizing that that kind of legislation simply would not pass constitutional review was very important. I think both the affirmative action decision and the whole women’s health case, the access to abortion, they kind of quieted the turmoil that was going on. How was the Court going to rule? This way or that way? I think, for the nonce, we will not have any major cases in either field because the Court spoke. I think both decisions were excellent, very well-reasoned, and will be accepted.

When you joined Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, you were the second woman. She was the first. And even though she was a Reagan appointee and you were a Clinton appointee, you had a bond right away.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: She was almost like a big sister to me. Sandra Day O’Connor is a truly great woman. When I came onboard she told me just what I needed to know to be able to manage those first weeks. She didn’t douse me with a whole bunch of stuff that I couldn’t possibly retain. At so many stages of my life she gave me good counsel. When I had colorectal cancer, Sandra had had breast cancer. She had massive surgery. She was in court hearing argument nine days after her surgery. So her advice to me was, “Ruth, you’re having chemotherapy. Schedule it for Friday so then by Monday you’ll be over it. You’ll be over the bad effects.” That’s how she was. Anything that came her way, she would deal with it. She would just do it.

JusticeO’Connordid a very generous thing for you, relatively early in your tenure, when the Court heard the VMI case testing whether the Virginia Military Institute could exclude women.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Virginia Military Institute is a fine school. It offers an incredible opportunity, but it limited that opportunity to men. There were women who were ready, willing, and able to go through that arduous training. What they wanted more than anything else was the kind of old-boynetwork. The VMI alums are very loyal. They try to help the graduates on their way. And I think only about 15 percent of VMI graduates end up with military careers. The rest are in business and commerce. So it was an important opportunity that was not open to women, and there was nothing comparable for them. I wanted to write the decision. And by the way, the name of the case is revealing. It was “United States against Virginia.” It was the United States Government that was suing the state of Virginia, saying, “State of Virginia, you can’t offer an educational opportunity to one sex only.” I was rather low on the totem pole. In fact, I did get the assignment because Justice O’Connor said Ruth should write this case. I think she had considerable seniority then, and so she would have been the logical person to get the assignment, but she said I should write it.

Another one of your friends, not just on the Supreme Court but on the Court of Appeals before that, was Justice Scalia. He was the sole dissenter in that case,but you’ve said that he did you a favor in that case.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: He came into my chambers with what he said was the penultimate draft of his dissent in the VMI case. He said he wasn’t quite ready to circulate it to the Court. It needed more polishing. But the term was getting on toward the end and he wanted to give me as much time as he possibly could to answer his dissent. I was about to go off to my circuit judicial conference. I took the opinion draft with me. I started reading it on the plane to Albany, and it was —even for Scalia — it was a real zinger. It was. So I spent the whole weekend thinking about how I would — in a restrained and moderate way — answer to these comments. I mean he took me to task for everything. I had a footnote in which I referred to “the Charlottesville campus of the University of Virginia.” He said, “We must excuse this Justice who is probably more familiar with schools in New York where they may have a campus here and a campus there. There is no Charlottesville campus. There is only the University of Virginia. Period.” The greatest thing for me was to have a Scalia dissent. He would point out all the soft spots, and that would give me an opportunity to improve the opinion to make it more persuasive than it was before I got this stimulating dissent.

After theObergefell v. Hodgesdecision, which legalized gay marriage,you attended a social occasionalong with Justice Scalia and ended up singing together, didn’t you?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: It was the day of the same-sex marriage case. Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion for the Court. I joined him. Justice Scalia dissented vigorously. That’s an understatement. And yet we were all together that evening at this wonderful dinner that Catherine and Wayne Reynolds had. The head of NIH took out his guitar. Renee Fleming began to sing with him. And everybody joined in. So there was Justice Kennedy and Justice Scalia, and I was there too, all singing rather raucously, “The times, they are a-changing.”

There was an opera written about you and Scalia and your conservative liberal friendship. You had a couple of favorite lines from one of the arias in the opera.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Well first, in the Court everything goes by seniority, so the opera is Scalia/Ginsburg. Even though I was three years older than Justice Scalia, he was appointed several years before I was, so he comes first in the ranking. It opens with Scalia’s rage aria. And for those who know music, it’s straight out of Handel, real Handelian. And the words are: “The Justices are blind. How can they possibly spout this? The Constitution says absolutely nothing about this.” And then my answering aria is: “Dear Justice Scalia, you are searching in vain for bright-line solutions to cases that have no easy answer, but the great thing about our Constitution is like our society, it can evolve.” And then the opera switches into a jazz mode, and the singer goes on, “Let it grow, let it grow!”

What does the American Dream mean to you, Justice Ginsburg?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: How can I describe the American Dream? Maybe it’s captured by the first ride I took on a New York subway, after returning from several months in Sweden, where everybody looked the same, and here I was on the subway, and the amazing diversity of the people of the United States. You know the motto is E pluribus unum— “Of many, one” —and that’s the idea that, more than just tolerating, we can appreciate our differences and yet pull together for the long haul. So that is my idea of the American Dream, sometimes referred to as “the melting pot.” That’s not quite right, because we keep our individual identities, but we are all Americans, and proud to live in the land of the free.

This is a historic moment for the Supreme Court, an unprecedented three Supreme Court justices are women, something Justice Frankfurter would have been very surprised by. Talk about how that might affect the future.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: It’s obvious now that women are really here and we’re here to stay, just as men are. We are not one or two at a time curiosities. So I think this is an exhilarating change. When I was a new justice on this court for the twelve years that I sat together with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, invariably one lawyer or another would call me Justice O’Connor. They had become accustomed to a woman on the court and Justice O’Connor was the woman, so if they heard a woman’s voice — well, that must be the lady justice, even though we don’t look alike, we don’t sound alike. But last year no one called Justice Sotomayor Justice Ginsburg or me Justice Sotomayor, and I am certain that lawyers will perceive the difference among the three of us and we will each have our individual identities. We’re not quite where the Supreme Court of Canada is. The Supreme Court of Canada also has nine justices: four are women, including their chief justice. I think we will not be too far behind.

What do you think is the next frontier in women’s rights or civil rights? Where do we still need to go?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The hardest barrier to surmount for most women, I think it’s no longer at the entry level of any job, no longer access to any educational facility. I think, for example, that Justice Kagan did not encounter any discrimination in admissions to college, law school, getting a job, getting a clerkship. But what is very hard for most women is what happens when children are born. Will men become equal parents, sharing the joys as well as the burdens of bringing up the next generation? But that’s my dream for the world, for every child to have two loving parents who share in raising the child. And now, I think I have to go back to work.

Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us.